One of the air traffic management systems least well known to pilots is multilateration, sometimes called MLat, or multilat, or WAM (for wide-area multilateration). At any time of the day or night, and at airports and along air routes around the world, controllers routinely use MLat to monitor safe aircraft approaches to small airports in mountainous regions, or to track airliners as they taxi around major airports, or to ensure accurate separation between adjacent aircraft approaching on closely separated parallel runways, or to monitor aircraft positions over water or over large uninhabited areas where radar surveillance would be cost prohibitive.
MLat is an extraordinarily flexible and highly accurate controller tool enjoying growing installation numbers every year. Eventually significantly lower-cost MLat might replace ATC surveillance radar, whose services it duplicates and, in many applications, exceeds.
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