Air traffic control upgrades around the world

U.S. airspace is the most complicated in the world, requiring the most sophisticated of air traffic control systems. But If only parts of the system are taken into consideration, such as the controller workstation, or the means by which aircraft positions are identified, it is clear that pieces of technology in other countries have leapfrogged their counterparts in the United States.

"Overall," Martin Pozesky told IEEE Spectrum, "no one is really ahead of the U.S. But there is in place today more modern technology than that operating in the U.S." Pozesky is a former associate administrator for system engineering and development for the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and now a consultant in Potomac, Md.,

Modern air traffic control technology is designed around open systems using commercial off-the-shelf equipment, distributed processing, and high-resolution color monitors. It is being installed by a number of manufacturers. A prime example of such an approach can be seen in Norway [see figure]. At the Royken Air Traffic Control Center, near Oslo, Raytheon Co.'s Unix-based AutoTrac 2000 system, which was developed as an extension of an air traffic control contract awarded by Canada's government, has been installed. Commissioned in April 1996, this system was Raytheon's first open architecture air traffic control system.

Australia has also moved to an open systems architecture based on the Thomson-CSF Eurocat 2000 system, which uses Digital Equipment Corp.'s Alpha computers at its two en route centers. The country has also begun to implement the Global Positioning System (GPS) and data link.

At the newly constructed Swanwick Centre in Hampshire, England, 200 controller workstations made by Lockheed Martin Corp. are being installed. These systems were due to become operational this year, but plans now target 1998 because of delays attributed by Lockheed Martin to specification changes, an overly ambitious development schedule, software development difficulties, and training requirements.

Similar controller workstations have been or are being installed in Belgium, China, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Singapore, Taiwan, and other countries, according to John J. Fearnsides, senior vice president and general manager of Mitre Corp. and director of Mitre's Center for Advanced Aviation System Development. Significant delays are reported, however, in several of these countries.

Many former Soviet Bloc countries, whose air traffic control services had been provided by Russia, have also recently been purchasing off-the-shelf control systems made by Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Thomson-CSF, among others.

"Anybody who has purchased Raytheon's AutoTrac system, or any of the other [air traffic control] systems being sold today (like Lockheed Martin's Air Traffic Control Automation System), has a more modern computer system than that in use in the U.S.," said David Spencer, a senior staff member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory. But, he added, all these facilities have lower traffic densities and, in total, a less capable air traffic control system than that in place in the United States.

Looking ahead to improving air traffic control, Eurocontrol, a 22-member Brussels-based agency that is working to standardize air traffic operations in Europe, has launched the Program for Harmonized Air Traffic Management Research in Eurocontrol (Phare). The program is intended to develop computerized tools and data links to increase traffic flow and add more flexible flight capability, similar to the free flight concept, to European airspace.

The pioneer in satellite navigation is the Pacific island nation of Fiji, for it began making use of the Global Positioning System (GPS) in 1993. This was a much more cost-effective option for the small country than installing land-based navigation aids, reported Fearnsides.

Pilots confronting cloudy conditions there previously navigated by "dead reckoning," that is, by calculating location from their knowledge of direction, air speed, and estimated wind speed. Today, Tahiti and New Zealand are also using GPS-based automatic dependent surveillance (ADS). Hong Kong has tested ADS and data link, as has China, and several other Asian and Pacific nations have committed to installing ADS by 1999.

Meanwhile, the United States and Japan are collaborating on the development of advanced, satellite-based air traffic control systems to increase traffic density and improve navigational capabilities in the Asia-Pacific Region. Operations are to begin in the year 2000.

—T.S.P.