NATS to Use Sensis Multilateration Surveillance for North Sea Helicopters

NATS, formerly the U.K.'s National Air Traffic Services, awarded Sensis Corporation a contract to provide WAM (wide-area multilateration) surveillance for helicopters that support oil and gas drilling operations in the North Sea.

Sensis MDS (multistatic dependent surveillance) will enable surveillance and tracking of helicopter traffic to and from oil platforms from close to the helicopter deck up to 10,000 feet for 25,000 square miles of airspace off the coast of Aberdeen, Scotland.

According to Graeme Henderson, who manages surveillance and display systems for NATS, Aberdeen air traffic control handles more than 25,000 helicopter flights per year, and a large part of its airspace is beyond radar coverage.

MDS will locate and identify helicopters using sensors placed on the oil platforms, with a precision that is equal to or better than traditional secondary surveillance radars, and with the capability for higher update rates, regardless of weather conditions, Sensis says.

Marc Viggiano, the president of Sensis Air Traffic Systems, says multilateration is less expensive and yet more effective than traditional radar, and supports new technologies such as ADS-B (automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast).

The company's WAM has been demonstrated in a number of evaluation programs, including one which evaluated its ability to track helicopter traffic in the Gulf of Mexico.  03-10-2007.

Click here to become a registered Flt Tech Online subscriber and receive headlines delivered to your e-mail each week

Click here to go back to the headlines