Good evening, reader.

In April 1978, in a hotel ballroom in Montreal, 71 governments voted on which country would write the rules for how every commercial aircraft in the world would land. The choice was between three systems. The United States and Australia had merged their entries by that point, so the real fight was between Canberra-via-Washington and London. After three weeks of debate, the vote came down 39 to 24, with eight abstentions, in favour of the Australian-led design.

Australia had spent about $5.5 million on the project (Engineers Australia heritage nomination, citing Egon Stern, 1978). The Americans, the British, the French and the West Germans had spent multiples of that — a small fraction of the equivalent national programmes, by Stern's own reckoning at the time. A small team in a CSIRO division headquartered in Epping, Sydney, plus a Department of Transport secretariat and an industrial partner in suburban Melbourne, had outmanoeuvred four of the largest aerospace establishments in the world.

You have almost certainly never heard of it.

In today's newsletter: the time Australia wrote the international standard for aircraft landing, the diplomatic playbook that made it possible, the structural reason it never paid off, and the question that should be asked about every emerging-technology standard now in motion.

Let's get into it.

The Verdict

INTERSCAN (short for Time INTERval SCANning) was selected by ICAO in April 1978 as the international standard signal format for the next generation of aircraft landing systems, replacing the post-war Instrument Landing System (ILS) that every airport in the world had been using since the 1940s.

It is the only time, before or since, that Australia has authored a foundational international standard in commercial aviation.

The technology shipped. Heathrow uses MLS today, supplied by Thales, built on the INTERSCAN signal format. NASA used a derivative, the Microwave Scanning Beam Landing System, at the Shuttle Landing Facility. European airports adopted MLS as their replacement for ILS through the 1990s and 2000s.

The commercial outcome for Australia was a fraction of what the standard was worth. INTERSCAN (Australia) Pty Ltd was spun out to commercialise the technology, later rebranded as Interscan International, and ended up as a phased-array antenna business — a respectable engineering company, not the global aviation infrastructure player the standard might have implied. The bulk of the deployed equipment value flowed to Thales, NEC, Raytheon, and other foreign primes.

The deeper outcome is harder to see. In 1994 the United States Federal Aviation Administration halted further MLS development domestically, choosing instead to bet on GPS-based navigation augmented by ground stations (WAAS) (CSIROpedia; Smithsonian Air and Space, 2014). The standard Australia had won was effectively bypassed in its single largest market by a satellite system run by the US Department of Defense. INTERSCAN survived in Europe and at specific high-traffic airports, but the global rollout the 1978 vote implied never arrived.

The story is worth telling because it contains, in compressed form, almost every structural feature of how Australia does and does not capture value from its own innovation.

The institutional commons

INTERSCAN did not begin in 1971. It began in 1939.

In that year, in conditions of complete secrecy, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research established a Radiophysics Laboratory in Sydney to work on radar for the Australian and Allied war effort. The lab was led from 1944 by Edward "Taffy" Bowen, a Welsh-born physicist who had been one of three men responsible for the invention of British airborne radar in 1935–1940 — the technology that won the Battle of the Atlantic — and who was also the man who carried an early sample of the cavity magnetron from the UK to the United States in 1940 as part of the Tizard Mission, accelerating the entire American radar program.

Bowen ran Radiophysics for 24 years. By the time he retired in January 1971, the division had produced Distance Measuring Equipment (DME) — invented at CSIRO in 1945 and still part of every aircraft instrument panel — the Parkes radio telescope, and a deep institutional capability in microwave antenna design that had no real peer in the southern hemisphere.

This is the substrate. When the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) finally agreed in late 1969 to look for a replacement for ILS, and invited member states to submit proposals, Australia was not starting from zero. It was starting from thirty-two years of accumulated radar, radio astronomy, and microwave engineering capability, embedded in a single division of a single national laboratory, with a continuity of leadership that ran from the war straight through to the application.

In 1971, Paul Wild took over from Bowen as chief of Radiophysics. Wild had built his reputation on solar radio astronomy. The Department of Transport approached him about the MLS competition. Wild understood quickly that one of the more promising design directions — a "time reference scanning beam" approach the Americans had reluctantly abandoned because they could not build a suitable antenna — was solvable using techniques his division had already developed for the resurfacing of the Parkes radio telescope.

The vertical-profile shaping techniques used to keep cosmic radio signals clean of ground reflections at Parkes were the same techniques that, applied to a runway approach beam, would solve the exact problem that had defeated the US team. Wild appointed Harry Minnett as engineering director in 1972. By 1973, Amalgamated Wireless Australasia (AWA) and Hawker de Havilland had been contracted to build a flight-test prototype at Tullamarine.

The point worth holding is structural. The proximate inventors of INTERSCAN were Wild, Minnett, and a small team. The actual cause of INTERSCAN was a thirty-year-old institutional commons — a public laboratory with a stable mandate, deep tacit knowledge in microwave physics, working relationships with two domestic industrial partners, and a department of state (Transport) that knew how to operate inside ICAO. Strip out any one of those four ingredients and INTERSCAN does not happen.

Diplomacy

Where INTERSCAN diverges from the usual Australian innovation story is what happened after the technical work.

The Department of Transport understood from the start that Australia was not going to win a head-to-head technical fight with the United States, the United Kingdom, France and West Germany. The budgets were not comparable. The political weight was not comparable. A frontal contest at ICAO would end with the US system selected, polite acknowledgements offered, and the Australian work archived.

So the Department executed something Australian engineering history rarely produces: a deliberate technological diplomacy strategy.

The plan, as Egon Stern of the Department of Transport described it at the time, was to ensure "that the principles of INTERSCAN were embodied in the finally selected system" rather than to win the badge. Australia would not try to defeat the United States. It would try to become the United States submission.

A senior US technical mission visited Australia in 1974. The Australians did not give them a sales pitch; they gave them a working demonstration. Then, rather than ship hardware to the United States — Australia only had an experimental prototype, and it would not have survived the trip — the team agreed to a joint flight test in mid-1974 at Atlantic City, New Jersey, in which a US scanning system was modified to transmit the INTERSCAN signal format and an Australian receiver was used in the aircraft.

The US system worked better with the Australian signal format than with its own. By the end of 1974, the Americans had quietly redesignated their entry by its generic name, "Time Reference Scanning Beam" (TRSB), and adopted the Australian-designed signal as the format they would take to ICAO. AWOP, the ICAO working group, agreed to treat TRSB and INTERSCAN as a single joint submission.

In March 1975, Australia demonstrated INTERSCAN at Melbourne Airport to the ICAO Working Group. The pilot put the aircraft down sixty centimetres from the centre line of the runway. The UK was invited to subject its competing Doppler system to the same test at Sydney. The UK declined.

By the April 1978 ICAO vote in Montreal, West Germany had withdrawn its own submission and lined up behind TRSB/INTERSCAN. The final tally — 39 in favour, 24 against, 8 abstentions — selected the Australian-designed signal as the recommended international standard.

This is the part of the story Australian innovation policy has not internalised. The technical work was world-class but not unique; the US, UK, French and West German teams were also producing serious systems. What was unique was the strategic decision to subordinate the Australian flag to the technical principles, to absorb a much larger national programme into the Australian one rather than compete with it, and to use joint flight testing on US soil as the mechanism. Standards bodies are political institutions. Australia treated them that way.

The Commercial Fracture

And then the commercial outcome did not follow.

Three structural reasons. None of them is the technology.

First, the export-industry build-out was an afterthought. Stern's own 1978 article notes that "the program was not directed towards commercial objectives" — Australia treated INTERSCAN as a contribution to international civil aviation and as a sovereign capability play, not as the basis of an industrial export programme. The Department of Productivity began funding industrial commercialisation only from 1976, two years after the US partnership had been struck. By the time INTERSCAN (Australia) Pty Ltd was operating, Thales, Raytheon, and a handful of European primes had already built the ground-equipment franchises the Australian work had enabled.

Second, the United States changed its mind. The 1978 standard was won. The 1994 FAA decision to abandon MLS rollout in favour of GPS — a system controlled by the US Department of Defense, requiring no international standards negotiation, and able to use existing satellite infrastructure — gutted what would have been the largest single market for INTERSCAN-compatible equipment. MLS persisted in Europe and in specific applications (Heathrow, NASA's Shuttle Landing Facility, certain military environments), but the global rollout that the standard implied was overtaken by an entirely different technology stack that the United States had decided to own end-to-end.

Third, Australia did not capture the regulatory rent. Owning a standard creates a recurring revenue position only if the country owning it also owns the certification, the conformance testing, the type approvals, and the systems integration relationships. Australia owned the signal format and the conceptual architecture. It did not own the global test-and-approval ecosystem. That ecosystem sat in Washington, in Toulouse, and in London. Once the technology shipped, the rents flowed to the integrators.

The lesson is not that the diplomacy was wasted. INTERSCAN did become the standard. Heathrow does run on it. The lesson is that winning the standard is the easier half of the problem. The harder half — owning the certification, regulatory, and integration layer that converts a standard into an annuity — was never seriously attempted.

What this means for Now

The instinct to file INTERSCAN as a charming story from the 1970s is wrong. The structural pattern is live, and the next round is being played right now, on at least four standards battles where Australia has comparable or better technical capability than it did in 1971.

Critical minerals processing. Australia mines the inputs to every magnet, battery and semiconductor in the global energy transition. The processing standards, conformance regimes, and certification frameworks are being written elsewhere. The 1971 question — can we ensure that the principles of our submission are embodied in the finally selected system? — has a 2026 equivalent. Currently nobody in Canberra is asking it the way the Department of Transport asked it in 1973.

AI safety and agentic standards. ISO/IEC, the EU AI Act apparatus, the US NIST AI Risk Management Framework, and a clutch of industry consortia are negotiating the standards that will govern agent orchestration, model evaluation, and provenance for the next decade. Australia has world-class AI safety researchers, an active reform conversation around the Privacy Act, and an industrial AI sector that is small but technically credible. The "Department of Productivity 1976" moment, wiring the technical work to a deliberate diplomatic strategy at the relevant standards bodies, has not happened.

Quantum. Australia genuinely leads in silicon-based quantum computing through the work at UNSW and the spinouts around it. The standards that will govern fault-tolerant quantum networking, post-quantum cryptography migration, and quantum-classical interfaces are being drafted now, in committees where Australian representation is thin and tactical.

Sovereign aviation infrastructure. GPS jamming and spoofing have become routine in contested airspace (Inside GNSS, 2010 onwards). The original sovereign-capability argument for MLS — that ground-based, runway-specific landing systems do not depend on a satellite constellation controlled by a foreign defence ministry — is back on the agenda in defence-civil aviation working groups. Heathrow already runs MLS for exactly this redundancy logic. Whether Australia treats this as an opportunity to revive its own work in the area, or as a curiosity, is a current decision.

In each of these cases the INTERSCAN playbook applies. Build the technical commons in a public lab. Pair it with one or two industrial partners that can manufacture. Subordinate the flag to the principles inside the relevant international body. Run joint flight tests on the larger party's territory if that is what it takes to embed your design. Do not assume that winning the standard is the same as capturing the market — fund the certification and integration layer in parallel, not as a 1976-style afterthought.

The pattern is repeatable. Australia ran it once, won, and forgot it.

What to Take from This

The INTERSCAN story is not a story about a clever piece of microwave engineering. It is a story about a country that briefly understood that standards are markets, and that entering a standards body with a coherent industrial strategy is the closest thing the modern economy has to a Cantillon-effect lever — the people closest to the standard's inception capture the largest share of the value it eventually distributes.

Australia entered the room in 1973 with that understanding. It left in 1978 with the standard. It then walked away from the certification and integration layer that would have converted the standard into an industry, and the market it had won went to the integrators it allowed to do the work.

The technical capability is still here. The institutional commons: Radiophysics, the AIS biomechanics tradition, UNSW quantum, CSIRO's data and AI work, the defence research network — is real. What is missing is the Department of Transport equivalent: a department of state that treats international standards bodies as economic infrastructure, that briefs and resources Australian technical teams to operate inside them, and that funds the certification ecosystem in parallel with the technical work.

There is no structural reason a country that wrote the world's aircraft landing standard with $5.5M cannot write the world's agentic AI orchestration standard, or its critical-minerals provenance standard, or its post-quantum migration standard. The constraint is not capability. The constraint is whether the question is being asked, in which department, by whom, with what budget, and with what mandate.

In 1971, somebody in Canberra asked it. The result is at Heathrow.