Cutting edge

Australian Aviation recently visited the company’s headquarters in the World Trade Centre in Melbourne, to receive a tour of the company’s new, $1 million Centre for Advanced Studies in Air Traffic Management, or CASIA. Built with significant support from the State Government of Victoria this cutting edge laboratory, with its distinctive criss cross patterned carpet, will be used by the company to develop civil and military ATM solutions for markets here and abroad. It will also be available to third party users such as educational facilities and Thales clients.

Australian Aviation was guided on its exclusive tour of the Centre by its manager, Grant Williams, Innovation Manager, Thales Air Operations and Jon Wachman, ATC Major Projects Director. Mr Williams comes to Thales from a mechanical engineering background and is a leading authority on Java Human Machine Interface (JHMI). Mr Wachman spent 15 years in the RAAF where he flew Caribous and Macchis before aiding the implementation of ADATS, the Australian Defence Air Traffic System.

Thales Australia

Thales Australia is a significant player in the local defence industry, whose 3500 local employees are engaged in the design and manufacture of such diverse products as the Bushmaster mobility vehicle, the Austeyr rifle and advanced sonar systems.

The company’s association with ATM systems in Australia began in 1994, when AirServices Australia awarded Thales the contract to develop the Australian Advanced Air Traffic Control System (TAAATS). This computer based system gave air traffic controllers at centres in Brisbane and Melbourne information about an aircraft’s position and heading, and was linked to 23 radar towers arranged primarily along the Eastern seaboard.
It was responsible for monitoring Australia’s sovereign airspace, which, along with Flight Information Regions covered by Airservices Australia, accounts for 11 per cent of the globe’s surface.

The initial commissioned version of TAAATS was fielded in 1998, and since then has undergone a rolling series of hardware and software upgrades, including safety net improvements, ADS-B integration, new conflict detection tools and new radar tracking. Much of the innovation and upgrading of Australia’s ATM system is driven by its biggest user, the commercial airlines. As Jon Wachman explains “AirServices Australia and the ADF manage Australian airspace as service providers, if you like. The airlines pay the AANSP (Airways Air Navigation Service provider, ie AirServices Australia) a rate for every flight they do, the airway they use,. So the airlines pay the bill, in reality, so therefore they are very influential in pushing for improvements in the system to get forward trajectories, to get constant approaches, so they’re not putting the speed brakes out on descent because that costs fuel. They want those levels of efficiencies so they can fly off those what are traditionally called air routes, the best most economic routes taking in all of the conditions. And they, AirServices and Thales all make sure that’s done as safely as possible”

Eurocat And Flowcat

Having developed and rolled out TAAATS, Thales Air Operations turned its focus to the next generation of advanced ATM, EUROCAT. Also developed in Melbourne, its sales brochure (yes, it has one), claims EUROCAT is ‘designed to meet the needs of any area control centre. Approach control centre and airport tower’ and can control traffic ‘in continental en route, terminal approach, transcontinental and oceanic airspace.’ It also notes the EUROCAT systems currently control the airspace over 40% of the world’s surface area (not forty percent of the world’s traffic). This system has been exported to countries as far afield as Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. But EUROCAT has also been particularly successful in Asia, with sales to Taiwan, Vietnam, South Korea, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, the Phlippines. China too has proved a lucrative market for Thales Air Operations, which operates three systems in three of its largest cities via a joint venture.

In recent years, it trained 300 Chinese ATCs in Melbourne, a huge undertaking that underscores the company’s shift from systems manufacturer to systems integrator. Australia’s proximity to Asia has certainly been no hindrance and helped ensure Melbourne remains as Thales’ centre of excellence for EUROCAT’s user interface and training systems. Little wonder then that Thales Australia accounts for over a quarter the company’s employees engaged in air traffic management.

Another product, developed locally and sold internationally, is the company’s FLOWCAT ATFM (Air Traffic Flow Management) system, which, as the name suggests, helps manage traffic flow and capacity at a national or sub regional level. Spawned by a request from a South African customer for an automated flow management system to handle the expected influx of commercial passenger traffic for the 2010 World Cup, FLOWCAT has been refined and developed into a very impressive system. Aircraft can be deconflicted up to eight hours before a potential collision, thanks to the electronic lodgement of flight plans.

These are graphically rendered on the controller’s monitor, showing the aircraft’s intended path over a controller’s area of responsibility. The system also makes allowance for late take offs or delays due to weather, alerting the controller to any possible confliction event and allowing enough time for remedial action to be taken. Safety aside, FLOWCAT has the added benefit of reducing fuel usage by means of User Preferred Routes and Air Traffic Flight Plan optimization. Thales also claims FLOWCAT can ‘address airspace and airport congestion issues, propose recovery solutions during and after ‘disruptive events’ and probes aircraft flight plans against moving thunderstorms and restricted areas and automatically proposes re-routes for them’. Increasing automation in ATM systems are not designed to replace the human element however- it’s unable to respond flexibly to things such an aircraft needing a priority clearance in the event of an in flight emergency, for example. What automation does allow, however, is a larger number of safely separated aircraft in a given sector, boosting capacity and an air traffic controller’s productivity.

CASIA

Thales is justifiably proud of its new Centre for Advanced Studies in Air Traffic Management, which is dominated by a large, open plan innovation laboratory featuring 16 wide screen computer monitors, the use of which is shared by Thales with partners in the ADF, airports and educational institutions. Two training rooms and a server room with an ADS-B ground station are located adjacent to the laboratory.

The training rooms are used by the company’s customers to ‘train the trainers’ in the fundamentals of their newly purchased ATM system. Customers, before accepting a system for operational use, may send an air systems designer to perform a critical systems review. In such cases, training rooms are used to review the system’s specifications, before a comprehensive test is run on a simulator, located in the laboratory.

The realism of these training scenarios is greatly aided by voice recognition software, which can generate an aircraft captain’s ‘response’ to a verbal clearance from a trainee Air Traffic Controller (ATC). The simulator also receives live data inputs supplied from CASIA’s Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B), a Thales designed system adopted by Air Services Australia to allow the tracking of aircraft without conventional radar. It represents a major commitment from Airservices to aircraft navigation in Australia and the company has installed 71 ground stations across the country. When combined with radar, ADS-B provides air traffic controllers with comprehensive coverage, especially above FL300 (30,000ft).

It works by means of electronic equipment onboard an aircraft automatically broadcasting the precise location of the aircraft via a digital data link. The broadcast contains a mixture of information, such as flight number or call sign, the aircraft’s globally unique airframe code, its latitude and longitude, barometric and geometric altitudes, rate of climb or descent, its velocity, emergency indication or special position identification and GPS position. Whereas previous systems have relied on the aircraft to identify itself after interrogation from a ground based radar, the ADS-B transponder emits a given aircraft’s flight information twice a second to ground stations and other airborne traffic.

As mentioned, data supplied by the ADS-B are used in training scenarios for trainee Air Traffic Controllers, who sit monitoring screens or ‘trackers’. Trackers fuse inputs from radars and aircraft sensors, then present the information as a slowly moving blip on an Air Situation Display. How best to prioritise, sort and render that information graphically is the art of Human Machine Interface. “You look at the older style system, you see the screen can get quite cluttered with lots of windows open” explains Grant Williams. “Now everything is displayed on the ASD. You roll a mouse over the aircraft on the screen, a window pops up with all its relevant details. It’s a java driven HMI.
We specify how much information is contained. For example, a blip doesn’t have a call sign, it’s just an SSR (secondary source radar) code. You mouse over and it’s basic information: aircraft type, wake turbulence, altitude, cleared altitude. Mouse over and you get a little bit more information, such as its call sign. What that means is the controller is looking at the aircraft as he’s acting on it and seeing what’s around it. The concept of this new HMI is that it only tells the controller what they need to know to avoid them becoming saturated’

The CASIA facility is also being used by Thales engineers to contribute to the ongoing programs to modernize both the European and US civil Air Traffic Management architectures (known, respectively, as SESAR and NEXT GEN). SESAR or Single European Sky ATM Research is a public/private partnership that aims to deliver faster, greener and safer air traffic management in Europe by 2020. Currently being developed at a cost of AUD 2.8 billion, SESAR has many European and global aerospace companies as stakeholders. Grant Williams explains. ‘We’re a credited partner of the SESAR Joint Undertaking, so we actually are able to get some of the Euro funding here to assist in the development of its human machine interface. We’ve won several awards for the technology and it’s been selected for a number of the work packages for SESAR, for their operational trials. Also, our sim product, or SIMCAT, has also been selected for SESAR too”.

Like SESAR, the US FAA intends its NextGen to usher in a wide ranging transformation of the country’s ATM system, with ADS-B and satellites as its technological cornerstones. Similar outcomes are predicted for NextGen as SESAR, namely reduced travel times and fuel burn, greater route flexibility, elimination of traffic delays, increased capacity, and increased safety. Change is coming to Australian skies too, in a process initiated by the government’s National Aviation Policy White Paper.
In April 2010, Airservices and the RAAF signed a Joint Operational Concept to introduce harmonized, air traffic management system for use by military and civil aircraft. Jon Wachman outlines the program’s scope:

‘The Air Force is replacing their ATM system under AIR 5431, and there’s a number of phases in that program, and Air Services are replacing TAAATS with what they call AFS, or Australian Future System. The Military system includes ATC towers, sensors and deployable systems. There’s a military and a civil system that are slightly different, so they’re trying to achieve harmonized systems to get some cost benefits instead of having a unique but separate systems. They obviously talk to each other in places like Newcastle, which is a joint user airfield, but looking at much more harmonization, especially in longer term support. So a lot of the new systems are not going to be introduces as a ‘big bang’, a lot of it is incremental, and will not be fielded for some years’

The replacement of two existing air traffic management networks would no doubt be a lucrative one, but Thales doesn’t have the field to itself. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Rockwell Collins are all players in the market, and will be following the progress of AIR5431 and AFS closely.

3d And Eye Tracking
Given the rapid expansion in computing power, it is an often asked question as to whether Air Traffic Controllers may one day be working with 3D screens. Grant Williams patiently explains why that idea may remain trapped in the alternative dimension of science fiction: ‘If you talk to the ops guys, they say no, it’s a novelty. If you’ve ever played around with a 3d environment on a 2D screen, it takes quite a lot of time for you to actually get your bearings as to how it all fits together. It’s actually a lot quicker to get a view of the air situation through a 2D screen. You can use filters to filter out the various levels. You can very quickly get a picture of what’s happening in 3D space through a 2D picture.”

The other major selling point of the CASIA laboratory is its use as a research tools for universities. Thales is currently working with
Swinburne University engineers working on eye tracking technology as part of a joint study into Human Machine Interface training. As a teaching aid, it will allow trainers to analyse a student’s eye movements and give appropriate feedback. Eye tracking software is also able to detect fatigue and stress levels by monitoring pupil dilation and blinking rates. As Grant Williams points out ‘There’s a team in France are assessing whether or not [eye tracking software] could be of use operationally. One application would be helping a controller to direct his gaze to a particular area where a conflict may be about to occur. But any roll out would be ten, maybe fifteen years away’

The High Aussie Dollar
For a company as export focused as TAAO, managing currency exchange movements becomes a factor in doing business. Hedging is undertaken by both the company and its clients in an attempt to control currency fluctuations, and overall Jon Wachman considers the high Australian dollar’s effect to have been limited: ‘Because it’s a high end product and the numbers are so big that these changes don’t make that much of an impact.’

Going With The Flow
The many awards won by Thales Australia Air Operations for their engineering is testament to the outstanding quality of their work. It’s notable that, at a time when mining companies are lionized for simply digging things out of the ground, companies such as Thales are continuing to invest in locally produced, highly specialized, intellectually intensive products for the world market, that can be exported more than once.
The CASIA laboratory represents a sizeable commitment to that process. And the criss cross pattern carpet? It’s a visual representation of every air route originating out of Melbourne.