Air traffic management in Australia will undergo harmonisation to bring together the civil and military management of Australia’s sky.
The OneSKY program will replace the two current systems – the Australian Advanced Air Traffic System (civil) and the Australian Defence Air Traffic System (Defence). Both systems have been in place since the 1990s and are reaching their end of life.
A request for tender for the development of the Civil Military Air Traffic Management System (CMATS) was issued in 2013 and identified 172 specific needs, including 51 new capabilities.
Key components of the tender included: greater flexibility across the system; greater adaptability, scalability and upgradability; and alerts for medium- and long-term conflict detection.
Usability for operators will also improve around the human machine interface (HMI), including enhanced information display and alerts, and a significant multi-partition distributed architecture.
“We’ve got 16 different partitions across Defence and Airservices to have this system in operation. We have wanted to have modern standards that are used to exchange information – called System Wide Information Management or SWIM – which is a standard that’s been developed,” said Warren Beeston, manager systems readiness for the OneSKY project.
“Those protocols will be used to exchange data between each of the sites and keep all the systems aligned and achieve integration.”
Under the new system, air traffic controllers will be able to access the same information, regardless of where they are located in Australia, to help prevent incorrect information being distributed.
“Those tools will help meet the demands of the additional traffic growth (forecast) and some of the changes that are happening within the airport capacity management initiatives,” Beeston said, with forecast air traffic growth pegged as high as 60% by 2030.
CMATS will also accommodate technological changes in aircraft capabilities – such as newer technology on airplanes like the Airbus A380 – to help manage aircraft better.
“We wanted to take advantage of the latest ground-based and satellite-based surveillance systems and technologies and be able to implement those within the system,” Beeston said.
This includes global tracking initiatives that have been introduced in Australia in recent years. For example, the announcement in early 2015 that Inmarsat would partner with Airservices Australia and other aviation industry stakeholders, such as Qantas and Virgin Australia, to trial enhanced flight tracking services on commercial flights to and from Australia.
There will also be additional alert functions for the protection of terminal areas and a Violation of Controlled Airspace Alert will be implemented.
Completely new capabilities will include using information from the cockpit to help with clearing flight levels.
“If (air traffic controllers) clear the pilot to a certain level and the pilot puts that level into their flight management system … we hear both of those pieces of information (and) we compare them,” Beeston said.
“If they’re the same, then that is considered ok. If that is different, we give them an alert because there’s likely to be some level of deviation from the clearance. That’s something we don’t have today.”
As with any large project, there have been challenges. This has included examining current products on the market and bringing together stakeholder interest.
In order to help with this, a governance structure was set up with Airservices and the Department of Defence. There has also been stakeholder engagement with the airspace regulator, the Civil Aviation Safety Authority.
“There are a lot of internal and external stakeholders – a lot of different expectations and a lot of different needs. It’s been challenging aligning those and bringing them together into a single set of requirements and coherent acquisition and support strategy,” said Clint Kelly, defence liaison for the OneSKY project.
Kelly said there have also been competing drivers in the project and they have needed to look at different products and determine how much development needs to be done and the impact on the project’s cost, schedule and safety implications.
“There have been quite a few competing drivers there (so) we’ve had to go on a journey to understand where the best balance is and come up with the best strategy for the project,” Kelly said.
The OneSKY programme will be released in a phased transition from 2018 to 2021.
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