China’s BeiDou SatNav system used in civil aviation for first time

China’s BeiDou satellite navigation system, developed as an alternative to foreign systems like GPS, has been used for the first time in civil aviation, after a Chinese regional jetliner conducted a test flight from Dongying Shengli Airport in east China's Shandong Province on Saturday morning.

The flight successfully tested the performance of the onboard navigation information receiver, the ground-based signal enhancement system, and the short-message function of BeiDou, according to the state-owned Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC).

The results showed BeiDou is on par with similar systems produced abroad, and even reaches internationally advanced levels in some respects, COMAC sources said.

BeiDou will now be applied in other homemade civil airliners.

It has seen increasing number of applications linked to everyday life, from shared bicycles to bank cards and unmanned patrol vehicles since China began building up a satellite constellation for the system in the early 2000s.

(ASIA PACIFIC DAILY)