Air Transport

A consortium of communications company Sita and infrastructure specialist Sofreavia is to supply and install the world's first specialist controller/pilot datalink communications (CPDLC) systems for two of Europe's major air traffic control centres.

The installations will be ready for site acceptance testing at the Maastricht upper area control centre (UAC) in the Netherlands and the Karlsruhe UAC in central southern Germany by August and will be fully operational early in 2008, says Sita director of cockpit communications services Philip Clinch.

These installations are the first to comply with the Eurocontrol Link 2000+ programme, the purpose of which is to replace routine voice communications with written messages that appear on cockpit displays, and can be printed out. The system uses the Link 2000+ specified VHF datalink 2 (VDL-2) medium. The Sofreavia/Sita consortium is to supply Maastricht and Karlsruhe with the datalink front-end processor and the aeronautical telecommunications network router that converts menu-selected messages uplinked from the controllers' workstations into the correct protocol and routes them, via VHF transmit/receive ground stations, to the addressed aircraft, and do the same for downlinked acknowledgements or requests from the pilots.

Under a Link 2000+ incentive scheme for airlines to equip their aircraft with VDL-2 CPDLC capabilities, 150 aircraft are already fitted out, and Clinch says he estimates about 400 will be equipped by the end of 2008 as the 2009 date for mandating CPDLC capability approaches.

From January 2009, according to the Eurocontrol mandate, new-build aircraft needing to operate above flight level 285 (28,500ft/8,350m) must be CPDLC capable, and by January 2014 all older aircraft must have been appropriately retrofitted or they would have to operate in lower airspace. All ANSPs must have their groundstations compliant by 2011.