OTTAWA—A new constellation of satellites is taking shape in orbit that will provide air traffic controllers a new eye in the sky to track aircraft over vast expanses of the globe, including large swaths of Canadian airspace.
The first 10 satellites were lofted into orbit by a SpaceX rocket last month and by mid-2018, when the full array of 66 satellites is deployed, this space-based surveillance promises to revolutionize air traffic control.
“Active surveillance of where all the aircraft are all the time gives you huge safety benefits and allows you to really improve the service and the efficiency,” said Neil Wilson, the president and chief executive officer of Nav Canada.
Nav Canada is the private agency responsible for providing air traffic control services in Canada. It’s not only a customer of the new technology but a majority owner of Aireon, the U.S. company behind the project.
Wilson says the $150-million investment by Nav Canada helped make sure the initiative got off the ground. “We saw the value of it for our operation, but mainly for our customers,” he said.
That’s because as commercial jets have grown more sophisticated in their capabilities, air traffic control has failed to keep pace. It relies on ground-based radar to track aircraft over land. Yet in mountainous areas, remote regions and over the oceans — all beyond line-of-sight radar signals — aircraft drop out of sight of the electronic eyes of controllers.
Indeed, some 70 per cent of the Earth has no real-time air traffic control surveillance. In these areas, controllers resort to procedures to ensure the safe separation of aircraft.
To do that over the North Atlantic, the busiest oceanic airspace in the world, controllers publish set tracks, like multi-lane highways in the sky, for commercial jets to follow each day. For the nightly eastbound flights, the tracks are laid out to take advantage of the tailwinds. And for the daytime westbound flights, the tracks are designed to avoid the worst of the headwinds.
With jets organized into neat conga lines for the oceanic crossings, air traffic controllers in Canada and Great Britain responsible for overseeing North Atlantic airspace rely on age-old procedures to ensure they all stay safely separated.
They keep tabs on the oceanic flights using regular position reports from the aircraft, filed about every 10 to 15 minutes. Yet in that interval, a jet can travel more than 200 kilometres. To ensure safety, controllers surround each aircraft with a big bubble of airspace — the tracks are 111 kilometres apart laterally and aircraft on each track are spaced 10 minutes apart horizontally, about 150 kilometres, and 300 metres vertically.
It’s safe. But it’s not efficient as many aircraft, because of that excess spacing, are denied the most optimal routings, costing them time and fuel.
“The tracks are designed to be as good as they can be but optimal flight isn’t available when you have to run people on the equivalent of railway tracks,” Wilson said.
Indeed, he says very few of the 1,200 oceanic flights handled each day by Nav Canada are getting the most efficient combination of routing and altitude because of restrictions imposed by not having real-time surveillance of the airspace.
The new system promises to change that. Known as automatic dependent surveillance broadcast (ADS-B), aircraft equipped with the system broadcast a radio signal with their exact location, taken from onboard GPS receivers.
ADS-B is currently used to track aircraft in some locations — like the remote region around Hudson Bay using ground-based antennas. The new satellites will allow those signals to be tracked from space too and fed to air traffic controllers, providing a radar-like picture.
Real-time surveillance will bring significant safety benefits by giving controllers the precise location of aircraft around the globe, said Don Thoma, chief executive officer of Aireon.
But it will bring a big improvement in fuel savings too, he said. “Now you can see every aircraft, everywhere, real-time,” Thoma said.
“You now have tools that you can provide to the controllers and to the pilots to let them file and fly more optimal flight paths which will provide a substantial amount of fuel savings,” he said.
Over the North Atlantic, it’s expected that real-time surveillance will allow controllers to space aircraft just under 30 kilometres apart, Wilson said, enabling more aircraft to take advantage of the most fuel-efficient routings.
On a typical flight to London from Toronto, that could mean saving between 500 and 1,000 litres of jet fuel, worth almost $1,800. And reduced fuel burn means fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
For Canadian controllers, the new system will also help as they guide traffic across Canada’s vast north, both domestic flights and the some 12,000 polar flights that transit the airspace jetting to and from destinations in Asia each year.
Air traffic control agencies in jurisdictions such as Singapore, South Africa, Ireland and Iceland have signed on to use the new technology, paying Aireon for the data. Those costs will be passed along to airlines but Wilson said they will be outweighed by the savings in fuel and should not have any impact on ticket prices.
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