Single Sky Committee unanimously supports Aeronautical Data and Information Quality (ADQ) Implementing Rule
On 04/11/2009, in SWIM, by steve
The drive is on to transform Aeronautical Information Services (AIS) into Aeronautical Information Management (AIM). This is needed to set the scene for the introduction of System Wide Information Management (SWIM), the ultimate goal of the activity.
The change from AIS to AIM is primarily the morphing of the traditional, package based aeronautical information system into a data-based one, where users are provided with data to feed their particular applications in the way they need it rather than being fed with pre-cooked packages that do not really satisfy anyone while also being extremely difficult to change when new requirements turn up.
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Wake turbulence gone with the wind – the CREDOS project
On 03/11/2009, in Life around runways, by steve
The problem of vortices
There are two kinds of dangerous phenomena behind large aircraft. Jet wash and wingtip vortices. These are the most important components of what is commonly referred to as “wake turbulence”. The intensity of this turbulence depends on a number of factors, among them the mass of the aircraft concerned. Jet-wash is simply the rapidly moving air expelled from a jet engine. While it is extremely turbulent, it dissipates quickly in both time and space.
Wingtip vortices on the other hand are much more stable and can remain in the air longer after the passage of an aircraft. Wingtip vortices represent the primary and most dangerous component of wake turbulence.
The hazards of wake turbulence are particularly significant during the landing and take-off phases of flight. Aircraft are in a configuration that creates the strongest vortices while they are also flying at a low speed and low altitude. This leaves little margin for recovery in the event of flying into wake turbulence.
In daily operations the risk of encountering wake turbulence on approach or take-off and initial climb out is mitigated by increasing the spacing between lighter aircraft and a preceding heavier one. The time or distance based minima prescribed to ensure this spacing (the so called wake turbulence separation minima) are static and are based on a worst case assumption of the persistence time of the vortices. While this practice ensures safety, it also reduces the actual throughput of runways below what would otherwise be achievable.
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Interesting people, unusual flight plans…
On 21/10/2009, in Interesting people, by steve
Istvan Bozsa – forever controller
What were you dreaming of becoming when you were a kid?
We lived near the airport and I was dreaming of becoming a pilot from very early on. I remember how we took the bike to ride all the way to the perimeter fence and watch the planes for hours on end. I must admit that we also stopped to watch the trains at the railway crossing but the planes were the main attraction.
Traditionally there is an air-show on 20 August in Budapest and watching it I felt this incredible pull and attraction… I wanted to be part of it all; I wanted to be a pilot.
I think my son has inherited this weakness… he has his PPL already (and an Aeronautic MEng).
How did you then actually become part of the ATC family?
Ice cream… it was the ice cream! At the time one of the best pastry shops in downtown Budapest had a satellite unit at the airport. The mother shop’s name was Honey Bear and the one at the airport was simply the Bear… They had the best parfait this side of the Solar system and we went there regularly to load up on that thing, teeth be damned.
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A short (unofficial) history of air/ground digital link – 2
On 18/10/2009, in Buzzwords explained, by steve
The clash of VDL Mode 4 and VDL Mode 2
Following years of testing and discussions on countless forums, VDL Mode 2 was emerging as the solution that, combined with the ATN protocol, could support the initial implementation of Controller Pilot Digital Link Communications. There was nothing else it could do but it had a huge advantage over everything else. There was agreement that it would do the trick! Some people tended to consider this virtue as being of little value but in fact it was as important as the link’s ability to perform. Achieving consensus on the scale needed to decide which link to use is an epic hurdle and when agreement is there, it should not be put in danger.
But that is exactly what was being done by the promoters of another technology that goes under the name VDL Mode 4. VDL Mode 4 can do everything, they claimed… It does voice, text messages and also ADS-B! Most of the claims were of course true and the initial hiccups with the system were no reason to discard it. Yet it never made it into the mainstream and the hard push did only one thing: delayed the inevitable, the final agreement on Mode 2. VDL Mode 4 lacked the most important element: industry agreement for implementation.
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Will training finally meet the future?
On 16/10/2009, in Viewpoint, by cleo
There are places in the world where ATIS (Automatic Terminal Information System) is still the hard to understand analogue affair, suffering not only from poor voice quality but also the multitude of accents their operators will dish out for you. Of course, somebody somehow will have approved them for use, poor quality, accent and all. Now talk to any organization that has installed a new type of digital ATIS and most of them will tell you horror stories (backed up by the manufacturers) about the new and in many cases totally unreasonable requirements such a digital system had to meet, supposedly to improve safety.
Safety is of course our primary concern but it is not served at all by allowing suspicions about the hidden gremlins in digital technology to drive requirements which are either not possible to meet or which drive up costs without contributing to safety. It is also counter productive to dream up new requirements simply because new digital versions of old tools “can do it”.
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Under Control – The story of The International Federation of Air Traffic Controllers’ Associations
On 14/10/2009, in Bookshelf, by steve
By Neil Vidler
Publisher: IFATCA
ISBN – 0-646-40574-8
A book written about the history of a professional association, published by the same association, will tend to present events from their particular point of view and Neil Vidler’s work on IFATCA is no exception. 318 pages of sometimes laborious text that is no doubt factually correct but it fails to properly present the rest of the aviation world in which IFATCA was created and in which it grew into the respected organization we know to-day.
This lack of context is particularly regrettable in the light of the long paragraphs devoted to ICAO (Friend or foe?) and the IATA Resolution 200 debate. While denying controllers free tickets is of course not the best way to make friends, this issue was certainly not the biggest problem of aviation at the time yet the book makes it look like it was the only issue that needed solving.
The book launches with the foundation of the federation and its first decade starting in 1961. The rest of the aviation world was transforming itself into mass transportation mode and in fact grew alongside IFATCA itself. The 70s, 80s and of course the 90s saw a huge culture change happen in the cockpit and after deregulation also in how airlines were being run. Pilots had to evolve and become not only good airmen but also system managers… They were called upon to manage a very expensive and sensitive business tool, the modern aircraft.
While ATC also evolved and did a marvelous job of handling ever more traffic, the same fundamental culture change had not really happened there yet in the time frame of this book which ends in 2001.
IFATCA’s life and struggles could have been made even more understandable to the reader if the revolution that was taking place in the cockpit and in the airline world had been provided as the backdrop to the story.
If you are looking for no more than a rather detailed, factual history of IFATCA, this book is a good choice. Not only to read end-to-end (something that might be a bit of a struggle) but also as a source of hard-to-find information in the years to come.
Performance Based Navigation Workshop, Budapest 17-18 November 2009 – Reminder
On 13/10/2009, in Events, by steve
BluSky Services is organising a Performance Based Navigation (PBN) workshop, to be held in Budapest, Hungary on 17-18 November 2009. The event will be hosted by HungaroControl and will take place at their premises.
Participation in the workshop is free.
As is well known, both IATA and CANSO have expressed their support for PBN and this important evolutionary step is also part of ICAO’s ATM strategy.
Participants at the workshop will learn about the ICAO PBN concept and how it relates to Performance Based Navigation (RNP) and technologies like ADS-B, MLAT and GNSS landing systems.
The list of presenters include ICAO, IATA, Honeywell, ERA Corporation, APAC, Quo Vadis/Airbus and ZEBRAFISH International.
Interest from all areas of ATM is substantial. Register now to ensure your place at this unique event!
For more details, the Agenda and registration, click here
To learn more about BluSky Services, click here
A short (unofficial) history of air/ground digital link – 1
On 12/10/2009, in Buzzwords explained, by steve
Introduction
Talking to a group of young controllers the other day I suddenly realized that Controller Pilot Digital Link Communications (CPDLC) and its enabler, air/ground digital link were a kind of given for them… Their centre has either already implemented it or had plans for it and while their opinion diverged on the usefulness of the thing, they certainly did not consider it as anything exciting. In a way this is good. The more everyday air/ground digital link becomes, the more we can consider having cleared a major hurdle in implementing an important capacity enabler.
But not being familiar with the history of a particular development reduces our ability to understand its shortcomings and its future potential.
With this article I would like to put on the table a few, sometimes amusing, sometimes incredible, details from the last 15 years of so about air/ground digital link development in the hope that it will be provide some insight into what is after all a very exciting development in air traffic management.
The story will not be comprehensive; it is only a summary and is based mainly on my recollections. I was pretty close to the fire but possibly for that very reason I may have seen things in a light that was colored differently from the actual reality. If you have better information, do comment on my version of the tale.
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Anniversary – The Y2K roll-over
On 02/10/2009, in Anniversaries, by steve
10 year anniversary on 31 December 2009
On call to usher in a new millennium
I am no longer with IATA but when I joined originally, night shifts were not mentioned as part of the job. Not that I would have minded, as an ex-air traffic controller I had plenty of experience watching the sun rise over the airport perimeter fence, or looking at the radar screen with the morning traffic building slowly…
But somehow 1999 brought two events that landed me once again in night shifts. One was 8.33, the famous new channel spacing in Europe and the other, the even more famous, Y2K computer bug.
As it happened, I was not closely involved in the preparations for the year-end rollover, this task having fallen in our office to other colleagues who had their hands more than full for the 18 months or so preceding the end of December . As our readers will probably know, the Y2K problem was the result of some “clever” programming tricks used by early programmers to save storage space, representing the year in dates by only two characters. Possibly they never expected computers to be still around by the year 2000… In the end, not only did some legacy hardware, as well as a lot of legacy software, survive to see the new millennium, even some of the latest creations came with the Y2K problem still built in and ticking away…If you enter a date in the year 2000 into one of those machines, the year will show 00, resulting in the computer possibly crashing in a number of colorful ways.
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(Before) all else fails… read the Concept! Part 2.
On 23/09/2009, in Buzzwords explained, by steve
What is a net-centric system?
Net-centric, in its most common definition, refers to “participation as a part of a continuously evolving, complex community of people, devices, information and services interconnected by a communications network to optimise resource management and provide superior information on events and conditions needed to empower decision makers.” It will be clear from the definition that “net-centric” does not refer to a network as such. It is a term that covers all elements constituting the environment referred to as “net-centric”.
Exchanges between members of the community are based not on cumbersome individual interfaces and point to point connections but a flexible network paradigm that is never a hindrance to the evolution of the net-centric community. Net-centricity promotes a “many-to-many” exchange of data, enabling a multiplicity of users and applications to make use of the same data which in itself extends way beyond the traditional, predefined and package oriented data set while still being standardized sufficiently to ensure global interoperability. The aim of a net-centric system is to make all data visible, available and usable, when needed and where needed, to accelerate and improve the decision making process.
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(Before) all else fails… read the Concept! Part 1.
On 22/09/2009, in Buzzwords explained, by steve
The birth of the SESAR Concept of Operations (CONOPS), perhaps not unexpectedly, was not an easy process. Although SESAR is claimed to be a user-driven project, when the airspace users tried to drive the development of the CONOPS, the road proved to be anything but smooth. Plenty of natural and artificial obstacles had to be negotiated before the final product was crafted and pronounced airworthy. In the end, the CONOPS had turned out to be much more than the usual representation of the smallest common denominator, agreed and supported by most, criticized by others.
Now, some two years after version 1 of the CONOPS saw the light of day, we still see a worrisome degree of misunderstanding, hesitation and claimed or actual ignorance persist around the concept. Apparently, some people just continue with legacy thinking, pleading ignorance that there is any direction being set that is relevant to them. Ignoring the guidance encapsulated in the CONOPS or giving it a new interpretation not in line with what was originally intended represents a grave danger to the effectiveness of the new air traffic management system and the SESAR project itself.
In this article, I will try to clarify a number of issues still burning around the CONOPS, answering also questions which have been put to us in recent months. Some items may appear trivial to those who have been involved in the SESAR definition phase but will be useful to our worldwide readers many of whom are innocent when it comes to any phase of SESAR.
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SWIM in the USA
On 17/09/2009, in SWIM, by ahmad and lesley FAA
System Wide Information Management (SWIM) is an advanced technology program designed to facilitate greater sharing of Air Traffic Management (ATM) system information such as airport operational status, weather information, flight data, status of special use airspace, and National Air Space 
(NAS) restrictions. SWIM will support current and future NAS programs by providing flexible and secure information management architecture for sharing NAS information. SWIM will use commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and software to support a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that will facilitate the addition of new systems and data exchanges, and increase common situational awareness.
How did SWIM originate?
EUROCONTROL initially presented the SWIM concept to the FAA in 1997, where it has been under development ever since. In 2005, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Global Air Traffic Management (ATM) Operational Concept adopted the SWIM concept to promote information-based ATM integration. SWIM is now part of development projects in both the United States (NextGen) and the European Union (Single European Sky ATM Research – SESAR).
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Performance Based Navigation Workshop, Budapest 17-18 November 2009
On 10/08/2009, in Events, by steve
BluSky Services is organising a Performance Based Navigation (PBN) workshop, to be held in Budapest, Hungary on 17-18 November 2009. The event will be hosted by HungaroControl and will take place at their premises.
Participation in the workshop is free.
As is well known, both IATA and CANSO have expressed their support for PBN and this important evolutionary step is also part of ICAO’s ATM strategy.
Participants at the workshop will learn about the ICAO PBN concept and how it relates to Performance Based Navigation (RNP) and technologies like ADS-B, MLAT and GNSS landing systems.
The list of presenters include ICAO, IATA, Honeywell, ERA Corporation, APAC and ZEBRAFISH International.
For more details, the Agenda and registration, check out http://pbn.bluskyservices.com
To learn more about BluSky Services, go to www.bluskyservices.com
The CFMU – Valuable asset or problem for the future?
On 30/07/2009, in Viewpoint, by steve
Few people remember the days of horrendous delays in Europe caused by the explosive growth of demand in the latter part of the 70s and early 80s. States tried to cope with the problem as best they could but the individual efforts made things worse as often as they helped in resolving the logjam. Clearly, a region-wide solution was needed. This solution was the Central Flow Management Unit (CFMU), designed and operated by EUROCONTROL on behalf of the ECAC States and with the full blessing of ICAO.
Now, several decades later, the future of the CFMU as a concept and as an operating unit may hang in the balance.
From protecting sectors to ensuring flight efficiency
The first attempt at keeping the ATC system from falling apart under the relentless traffic peaks went under the tab “flow control”. Indeed, this was not much more than a crude quenching of traffic flows which did eliminate sector overloads but left hundreds of aircraft stranded on the ground, delays skyrocketing.
The commissioning of the CFMU brought not only a regionally centralised awareness of the overall situation but also a change in how sector overloads were prevented. The departure slots disbursed by the CFMU are based on several considerations, including alternative routings and aircraft operator preferences, justifying the claim that traffic flows are now being managed rather than just being constrained as in the days of basic flow control.
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