On 13th December 2019, the Air Navigation Administration ANA hosted AROC, the Airline Representatives and Operators Committee Luxembourg.
After a word of welcome from the top management, ANA presented the progress of strategic projects such as the establishment of the Tower ground position for air traffic control. This project has a positive effect on aviation safety and will increase the efficiency of air traffic management by reducing tower frequency congestion and reducing the controller's workload. Another benefit is to avoid different frequencies associated with runway operations. The controller-pilot-communication will be improved, avoiding, for example, any confusion due to the call sign and increasing the situational awareness of the pilots.
The implementation of the Digital Clearance Delivery (DCL) feature will be a first step in this important project to meet the challenges of the future in terms of air traffic. The DCL will automate the departure clearance message without going through voice communication.
ANA also made a progress report on the many infrastructure modernization projects and in particular on the new surveillance chain, gathering all the detection and safety equipment facilitating the visualization of the air traffic by air traffic controllers through a brand-new graphical interface. This project was the culmination of the year 2019. On the main lines, the update of the surveillance chain consisted in replacing end-of-life technical and infrastructural equipment as well as communication, in optimizing and upgrading the software with new features that increase performance and improve safety. The surveillance system is running on the new ANA network in a new virtualized environment designed to host all future Air Traffic Management (ATM) systems. In fact, the virtualization is based on two site-separated server infrastructures build up by a number of physical servers that will host the operational ATM applications and will allow a flexible contingency solution for the applications hosted on the servers. This new concept represents the future of ATM systems and data centers. The new ATM infrastructure will be the hardware basis of the majority of the new ATM applications implemented within ANA Luxembourg.
The day concluded with a tour of the control tower, the new approach room and the new simulator for airport landside driving, which represents another major achievement of this year.