Canada to Deploy Sensis ADS-B and Wide Area Multilateration Surveillance
ADS-B Launches Canada’s Nationwide Deployment;
WAM Provides Coverage in Challenging Locations
EAST SYRACUSE, NY – February 13, 2007 – Sensis Corporation announced that NAV CANADA plans to award the company a contract to provide ADS-B and Multistatic Dependent Surveillance (MDS) for Wide Area Multilateration (WAM) Surveillance. Sensis ADS-B will provide surveillance of the 250,000 square nautical miles of airspace over Hudson Bay where there is currently no air traffic surveillance coverage, launching the country’s nationwide ADS-B deployment. Sensis MDS will initially be deployed in two locations – Vancouver Harbour including approaches to Vancouver International Airport, to enable surveillance and tracking of low-altitude sea plane traffic in the mountainous terrain; and the “Oil Sands” area of Ft. St. John to enable surveillance of commercial, general aviation, and helicopter air traffic.
“These deployments mark the beginning of our evolution from conventional radar to the next generation of air traffic surveillance,” said John Crichton, NAV CANADA President and CEO. “Sensis ADS-B and MDS are proven solutions that will provide the accuracy, reliability, and extendibility we need to ensure a rapid ROI and successful future deployment.”
The Sensis ADS-B 1090 ground-based transceivers will provide aircraft position information with sufficient accuracy and reliability to allow for five nautical miles of lateral separation. Today, due to the lack of radar coverage over Hudson Bay, aircraft must fly using procedural separation rules that keep them 10 minutes apart, translating into roughly 80 nautical miles of separation. NAV CANADA anticipates that the Hudson Bay ADS-B deployment will save customers $200 million in fuel costs over 15 years through more flexible and fuel-efficient flight routes.
Sensis MDS, a transponder multilateration system, uses low-maintenance, non-rotating sensors built to accommodate challenging environments. The system provides precision comparable to GPS, a higher update rate than traditional airport surveillance radar, and consistent surveillance performance regardless of weather conditions. Further, the system is compatible with ADS-B. As such, MDS provides NAV CANADA with an excellent surveillance solution for areas not easily served by traditional radar and a transitional vehicle to ADS-B. In Vancouver, MDS will provide WAM surveillance for congested sea plane traffic that fly below traditional radar detection over the mountainous terrain. In Ft. St. John, MDS will provide WAM surveillance in the “Oil Sands” area where increased oil mining is expected to increase general aviation and helicopter traffic, in addition to existing commercial aviation.
“Sensis ADS-B and MDS are a natural partnership to deploy,” said Marc Viggiano, Sensis Air Traffic Systems President. “ADS-B is the recognized future of air traffic control, and Sensis MDS can easily transition to support ADS-B – so NAV CANADA receives high-accuracy multilateration surveillance immediately while ADS-B equipage is low with an easy transition path to nationwide deployment. In fact, the ADS-B transceivers and MDS ground stations use identical hardware which results in reduced maintenance training and logistics costs for NAV CANADA.”
Sensis is a leader in the areas of ADS-B and WAM surveillance. Sensis pioneered the development and implementation of ADS-B, fielding the first operational ADS-B transceivers for both the Mode S Extended Squitter (1090 ES) and UAT datalinks. Sensis ADS-B is deployed as part of the U.S. FAA Capstone and Safe Flight 21 Programs in Alaska and across the East Coast of the U.S. Further, Sensis fielded the first commissioned multilateration system for WAM at Innsbruck, Austria. The system is also being deployed for WAM in Tasmania, Australia, Patuxent River Naval Air Station (Maryland) and Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center (California) – the world’s largest multilateration system.
