Two years after a jumbo jet went missing over the mid-Atlantic for hours before a formal alarm was raised, Canada is set to announce a major advance in oceanic air traffic control.
The June 1, 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447 into a desolate patch of ocean between Brazil and Senegal left many wondering how a huge airplane and 228 people could vanish with authorities taking little initial notice.
In an age of global positioning satellites and instant wireless communications, oceanic air traffic control remains a challenge, especially over the North Atlantic.
With more than 1,000 daily flights carrying hundreds of thousands of passengers, it is the busiest oceanic airspace on the planet. Traffic topped 367,000 flights last year and is running five per cent higher this year. Maximizing capacity is crucial to avoiding gridlock at 35,000 feet.
Yet because ground-based radar coverage is limited to coastal areas, tracking all those big jets and keeping them separated and on the most time-and fuel-efficient routes requires 61 specialized air traffic controllers stationed in Gander, N.L. and dozens more in Prestwick, Scotland with Britain's NATS (formerly the National Air Traffic Service).
On Monday, Nav Canada, the company that controls Canada's civilian airspace and the skies over the western half of the North Atlantic, is to announce a dazzling leap in technology that automates much of the job once done by controllers with grease pencils, paper flight data strips and analogue-era plastic "wiz wheels" for speed and distance calculations.
Faster, safer, cheaper and cleaner transatlantic travel is expected to follow.
Called the Gander Automated Air Traffic System Plus, or GAATS+, the system's high degree of automation and integration allows the current 10-minute longitudinal separation standard between same-speed planes in non-radar airspace to be cut in half, to five minutes.
That's equivalent to a much closer 50-mile separation for eastbound planes, 40 miles for westbound ones, opening the possibility for far more planes to exploit the most efficient routes. It also allows for earlier climbs to higher, more fuel-efficient altitudes and easier transitions from one flight level to another.
The system was commissioned April 14.
About 60 per cent of trans-Atlantic jets are equipped with the latest GPS position-reporting and text-based communications avionics to take advantage of GAATS+.
Nav Canada estimates the technology will save client airlines $1 million in fuel costs in the first year and reduce engine emissions by 3,000 metric tonnes.
