Paper 61 -- Validation of Required Surveillance Performance (RSP) Accuracy

This paper is concerned with the problem of validating that a proposed system meets RSP measurement accuracy standards. An established form for an accuracy test is the Close Approach Probability (CAP) criterion. When an absolute level-of-safety metric is employed, the CAP test requires determining the probability density that lies far into the tails of the separation error distribution. This paper demonstrates that the inability to know with certainty the form of the error distribution is a formidable obstacle to validating such a criterion. However, when a relative safety approach is employed, validation is less demanding.