Solution Provider and Consultant to the Air Traffic Management Sector

According to Amendment 1 to ICAO Doc. 4444 the format of flight plans will be changed and this change will be applicable on 15th November 2012.

As a consequence, this induces changes to all ATC systems that process and use flight plans. The transition process to the new format, however, can create temporary compatibility problems and also calls for large investment costs. According to recent polls, by far not all affected organisations worldwide have made specific plans to have their systems shaped up by the target date. Even if many central systems will be modified until the deadline, it is likely that some subordinate systems will fail to meet the date for lack of either time or budget.

COMSOFT has, at an early stage, identified the necessity for a powerful flight plan converter that not only provides a makeshift workaround for the impending transition, but actually embodies a permanent and comfortable solution to cater for the coexistence of both formats. The result is COMSOFT’s flight plan gateway AIDA-FPL, applying elaborate algorithms for the automatic and accurate conversion with minimum manual configuration effort.

AIDA-FPL automatically transforms flight plans from the new flight plan format into the present format according to the ICAO-recommended conversion tables. For symmetry reasons the converter also performs the reverse transformation from the present to the new format. The converter thus facilitates the full interoperability between systems, supporting the new format with those systems not having performed the transition yet. As an enhanced feature AIDA-FPL ingeniously manages the DOF (date of flight) procedure on behalf of all legacy systems that are not fully capable of this new flight planning method. In this respect, AIDA-FPL gives ANSPs more flexibility in adopting the new flight plan format, which in turn helps to avoid investments in existing flight plan-related ATC automation systems.The conversion and processing of flight plans is highly safety-relevant. Therefore, COMSOFT developed the flight plan converter AIDA-FPL as specialised gateway based on their proven aeronautical messaging gateway AIDA-NG. AIDA-NG has already evidenced its compliance with the strict EUROCONTROL Safety Regulatory Requirements (ESARR) on the advanced Software Assurance Level 3. The relation between the two systems further allows AIDA-NG customers to receive AIDA-FPL as a simple software upgrade. Due to its superior interoperability features, however, AIDA-FPL can also be integrated into any existing ATM environment as a stand-alone gateway appliance.

To ensure the accuracy of the conversion algorithms the converter was 100 % counterchecked for conformance with ICAO Doc 4444, Amendment 1, and was further scrutinised with a multitude of possible combinations of flight plan contents. To prove its stability under real circumstances, COMSOFT’s flight plan specialists tested the converter with thousands of randomly picked flight plans in present format. The test results have shown that only such flight plans were not automatically converted that were erroneous to an extent making them unsuitable for further processing.

Due to the high importance of the scheduled flight plan transition COMSOFT has nominated a dedicated FPL 2012 coordinator who advises their customers in all concerns regarding the transition and actively contributes to workshops and ICAO meetings related to FPL 2012. All these activities made AIDA-FPL the leading and most mature converter product available on the market, and already a considerable number of ANSPs throughout the world has implemented AIDA-FPL.

For further information, please visit our website at www.comsoft.aero or contact:
Miriam Geppert, Phone: +49 721 9497 – 1085

miriam.geppert@comsoft.aero