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28.12.2009
On 23 December 2009 an Agreement was signed between Estonian ANS and Thales Air Systems S.A. on the complete upgrade of the air traffic management system for Tallinn Air Traffic Control Centre.
The system modernisation costs nearly 100 million kroon – it is the biggest signed contract in the history of Estonian ANS. The preparation for the system upgrade agreement to be signed has taken almost 18 months. The system installation, testing, training of users and engineers will take about two years; the modernised systems shall be in use in February 2012.
Why complete upgrade?
The system that is currently in use was designed in mid 1990s, purchased at the end of 1999 and on 2 May 2002 EANS controllers commenced their operations at Tallinn ATCC using a new air traffic management system.
The efforts made prompt that further update of the existing system is neither easy nor reasonable, as the hardware currently used has not been manufactured for a long time, and for its extension it is possible to find only used equipment from second-hand market, many necessary functions cannot be updated for reasonable prices, since the core of the system is old and don’t support the requirements of the new functions. Therefore, it got quite financially questionable to update the system in the future; complete upgrade of the system looks wiser for the time being.
Systems similar to what we are going to buy are used in the majority of NEAP states (Finland, Sweden, Denmark) and their common platform makes it possible to share development costs as well as the efforts required for the system development, since the majority of the updates/upgrades originate from the developments within the frames of the Single European Sky programme and their implementation is a requirement imposed by the Implementing Rules of the European Commission.
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