Executive Overview: Jane's Air Traffic Control
By Jenny Beechener
31 October 2007
Managing three times the number of aircraft by 2025 is becoming the focus of the Air Traffic Control (ATC) business. The challenge demands a collective approach by all involved and has sparked a new era of cooperation between players in the aviation market.
Two major research and development programmes are under way in Europe and the US, both of which aim to deliver a threefold increase in capacity and a tenfold improvement in safety levels, coupled with a reduction in operating costs. Both delivered their concept of operations documents in 2007, defining the way airspace will be operated and managed in the future. Within that time period, ICAO predicts the number of passengers will increase from 2.1 billion in 2006 to 4.5 billion in 2025, an average growth rate of 4.5 per cent per annum.
A major contribution to the future airspace environment is the introduction of Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast (ADS-B), a surveillance technology that costs a tenth of the price of conventional rotating radar. It supports co-operative surveillance capability in the cockpit and on the ground, and paves the way for more autonomous aircraft separation concepts based on advanced pilot situation awareness tools.
The US awarded a USD1.8 billion contract to provide America's ADS-B network to an ITT-led team in August 2007. This programme is significant in launching the technology nationwide (previously it had been largely confined to trials and specialised projects such as those seen in Alaska), because it represents a fully outsourced contract by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) with strict cost guidelines. The outsourcing deal is a departure from the FAA's usual policy of in-house programme control and operation.
The first phase is a USD207 million, six-year contract to install 749 FAA-approved ground stations across the US by 2013. The first three years will cover equipment development, production and installation of 300 stations at priority locations by 2010. Following FAA testing and certification of these stations, the installation of the remainder of the systems is scheduled for completion by 2013. Over the subsequent 15-year period, ITT will provide ADS-B services throughout US airspace, for which FAA will pay a subscription fee of a little over USD100,000 million per annum.
ADS-B is one of three main pillars that make up the US modernisation programme. The Next Generation Air Transportation System, known as NGATS or NextGen, will also rely heavily on System-Wide Information Management (SWIM) to provide the infrastructure and services to deliver network-enabled information access across all air transport operations. The third component is NextGen Network Enabled Weather, which disseminates aviation weather information, which aims to cut current weather-related delays by half.
Pre-empting the US, Canada announced its major ADS-B programme in February 2007, when Nav Canada selected Sensis Corporation to provide ADS-B ground stations surrounding Hudson Bay in the north, Vancouver in the west, and the oil exploration centre of Fort St John in British Columbia, for installation in 2007 and 2008.
The award includes options for up to 200 ground stations that have the capability of supporting multilateration surveillance over a wide area, a positioning technique now being increasingly adopted by aviation authorities worldwide, viewed as an introductory step in the transition to ADS-B.
Nav Canada has not announced where future ADS-B or Wide Area Multilateration (WAM) installations will be made but it is expected that they will be gradually introduced in areas that have specific needs, as opposed to the FAA's nationwide blanket coverage.
In Hudson Bay, the ground stations will provide surveillance beyond the reach of land-based radars, thereby allowing airline traffic to be more closely spaced than the current non-radar procedural separations permit. Other areas in Canada's far north are expected to be high on Nav Canada's list of future ADS-B installations.
In the future ADS-B environment, every aircraft will transmit its identification, altitude, GPS position and other flight details once per second to all other aircraft in the surrounding airspace, providing all pilots with complete situational awareness of traffic in the vicinity.