Solution Provider and Consultant to the Air Traffic Management Sector

Successful site acceptance tests marked the culmination of implementing four OLDI FDE/FMTP gateways at the centres Swanwick and Whitley of British air navigation service provider (ANSP) NATS.

The systems were delivered, installed and tested by key supplier COMSOFT in less than five months in order to timely comply with Regulation 633/2007 released by the European Commission. It requires mandates that all Flight Data Processing systems in Europe are to be capable of exchanging their OLDI messages via FMTP and TCP/IP by April 2011. Current implementations in the UK, however, still operate on the previous FDE-ICD specification – utilising the X.25 protocol – which is not compatible with FMTP specifications.

By implementing this highly specialised gateway NATS will save a considerable amount of both costs and time which would have been necessary to adapt the existing systems to FMTP and in the next steps of connecting them to the Pan- European Network Services (PENS) and the completion of Integrated System Assurance. At the same time the gateway enables the successive transition of multiple OLDI systems while guaranteeing interoperability between all systems.

For the realisation of this project NATS selected the product COFFEE (COMSOFT OLDI FMTP/FDE Enhanced gateway) based on COMSOFT’s market-leading multi-purpose gateway AIDA-NG, trusted by numerous ANSP in Europe. Owing to both the system’s exceptional maturity and the outstanding collaboration between the involved NATS and COMSOFT staff members, the stringent implementation schedule could be met. As a result, NATS is expected to be among the first ANSPs to have the capability to comply with the new EC regulation on a national basis.

For further information, please visit our website at www.comsoft.aero or contact:
Gert Walter    Phone: +49 721 9497 – 1065 COMSOFT GmbH    gert.walter@comsoft.aero