Air Traffic Control dependence on conventional radar
could become a thing of the past for countries which
sign up to use a new sophisticated airspace surveillance service.The service is being offered by
the Australian Air Navigation Service Provider, Airservices Australia, in alliance
with SITA, the main IT provider of air/ground data link services to airlines and Air
Navigation Service Providers.

Details of the alliance were released at the annual Air Traffic Control
exhibition, ATC Maastricht. The announcement included Airservices and SITA support
for an Indonesian Directorate General for Air Communications ADS-B trial in
Indonesia.

ADS-B involves aircraft broadcasting their positional data every second which are
received by ground based ADS-B receivers and forwarded to Air Traffic Control
systems in radar like format suitable for processing and display to the air traffic
controllers.

Australia will be the first country in the world to implement Automatic Dependant
Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) technology enabling radar-like services across its
entire upper-level airspace by early 2007.

Greg Russell, CEO, Airservices Australia, said,  “It is a little over two years
since the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) Air Navigation Conference
endorsed the implementation of ADS-B as critical to enabling improvements in
airspace capacity, safety and efficiency. This was a major factor in our decision to
proceed with our Upper Airspace Programme (UAP) to provide ADS-B enabled
surveillance coverage throughout domestic Australian airspace above 30,000 feet
through the deployment of 28 ADS-B receivers and the associated upgrade to our Air
Traffic Management systems.

“Airservices Australia is very pleased to combine our technical and operational
experience with SITA’s extensive data communications network and local presence
throughout the Asia/Pacific region. We can now provide the region’s air navigation
services providers with the choice of procuring the service versus deploying and
operating their own ADS-B infrastructure.”

Mr Russell said ADS-B was ideally suited to nations with large land mass, difficult
terrain and archipelagos.
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