Thales UK has been awarded a contract to supply a Wide-Area Multilateration system to National Air Traffic Services.
A trial system to allow National Air Traffic Services (NATS) research & development to investigate the operational capabilities of Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast and Wide-Area Multilateration (WAM) to support their future en-route surveillance strategy, NATS will run the project in partnership with the Eurocontrol CASCADE programme through its CRISTAL UK 3 project.
The project will consist of a six-sensor active WAM/ADS-B systems located around London, and covering Heathrow, Gatwick, London City, Luton and Stansted airports. This will be used to validate the new technology against a proven radar surveillance picture. The system will utilise existing NATS sites and infrastructure to allow data to be collected and processed at the central processing station based at NATS Corporate Technical Centre (CTC) at Southampton.
A key outcome of the CRISTAL UK 3 will be to validate the safety of ADS-B/WAM in meeting the current 3nm separation standard, which is essential to operations in busy terminal areas like London.
Victor Chavez, deputy CEO of Thales UK, says, “This requirement is another key step in demonstrating that Thales is the supplier of choice in the civil/military surveillance market. The system that Thales is supplying to NATS uses the same technology that Thales is supplying to the USA for the FAA’s nationwide surveillance and broadcast services project.”
