The PANS-OPS Team at swisscontrol in Geneva L-R Roch Berset, Melanie Zick, Thomas Buchanan and Romano Germann

swisscontrol (now known as Skyguide) became one of the first users of Wavionix software over five years ago. As experienced users and because of the special problems they have to overcome in Europe's most congested area of airspace, we have dedicated a special issue of Wavionix World to the work of their PANS-OPS experts to demonstrate how they are utilising Wavionix Procedures Designer V.6.1

Swiss Air Navigation Services Ltd (swisscontrol) manages and monitors air traffic in Swiss civil airspace, at Zurich, Geneva, Berne-Belp and Lugano-Agno as well as in the non-Swiss airspace it is officially assigned. In addition, the regional aerodromes at Grenchen, St.Gallen, Altenrhein and since January 1st, 99, Les Eplatures, provide their own local air navigation services on behalf of swisscontrol.

In 1998 swisscontrol handled 1,924,359 flight movements which represented a 5.9 % increase over the total traffic for the previous year. Each year the demand on swisscontrol to provide the aerodromes it serves with increased capacity are met and much of the study, design and final implementation of how capacity is developed and increased goes through the PANS-OPS department.

Heading up the department is, Thomas Buchanan, who has been using Wavionix Software for the past two years although the department has worked with Wavionix for the past five years. Thomas has a team of four, with Roch Berset, Melanie Zick and Romano Germann working out of Geneva and Christian Weiss working out of Zurich.

He and his team believe that the time savings provided by using Wavionix software tools increase the productivity of each member of the team to a considerable extent enabling a relatively small department to take on a significant workload for the development of new procedures, checking and confirmation of existing procedures, and to prepare for the new challenges that will come with the transition to utilising GPS and GNSS procedures within the airspace delegated to swisscontrol.

Sectorisation of Swiss Airspace

The PANS-OPS department employs WPD6.1 extensively for airspace design as well as procedures design. Recently, they have been working on the new sectorisation for ATC in and around Geneva as the approach procedure to Geneva will change next year. The lower ATC section was re-organised into three geographical sectors (depicted by colour in the graphic) and WPD6 was used to export the co-ordinates of some areas. For this particular project, the team gave examples of how they use different programs in WPD6.1, they exported polylines and then made them available for use on radar maps. In addition, they designed the exact co-ordinates and converted them directly in WGS84 using the Wavionix geodesic program.

As a result of this significant change the team will have to study the new routes, which will change accordingly because of this new sectorisation and in turn the SIDS and STARS will also have to be changed.

Over 1700 flights pass over Geneva every day and incoming traffic averages 350 movements per day and peaks at approximately 700. Swisscontrol are committed to increasing the capacity for Geneva airport by 6% year on year and therefore the main objective of this sectorisation of airspace was to increase the existing capacity and relieve bottlenecks of air traffic.

Lower Enroute Chart
of Switzerland

In 1999 The European Air Route Network came into operation in Switzerland and as a result air routes are now divided into separate directions, rather like motorways. The new network of parallel one-way routes allows transit traffic to flow more freely.

All the enroute work for swisscontrol was originally undertaken manually. However, with WPD the department has saved at least 50% of the time required to complete the task manually. Roch Berset points out that the substantial times savings are made by not having to type in all the data because data can be imported directly into WPD from an Excel spreadsheet. All the trimming is done by Wavionix. All distances are calculated in nautical miles a factor which is extremely important to them.

Specific problems were encountered because they had a great deal of traffic ascending and descending at the same time, which made the whole design very complex because of the need to have different aircraft crossing at different times. WPD was used to change all the holding positions.

The results of this re-organisation were already seen in August '99 when 7% more traffic had been handled by swisscontrol. Furthermore, the reduction of crossover points in the lower airspace is anticipated to increase Swiss airspace capacity by as much as 20%.

Future plans include the utilisation of new aviation technology. At Zurich, for example, trials for RNAV approaches are underway. With the development of swisscontrol's new Air Traffic Management System (ATMAS) the radio/telephonic workload will become greatly reduced and therefore, in certain areas, the implementation of GPS/GNSS standard approaches will be possible.

3D Holding Near Geneva

This graphic depicts a VOR DME holding area between Zurich and Geneva in the lower airway. Wavionix was used to calculate and draw the fix-tolerance area and the nominal track. In Wavionix all the protection areas of the procedures are automatically drawn. Another benefit of using WPD in this instance is the facility to click where the VOR DME is and the resulting area width is given automatically.

The department has checked and redesigned many calculations for VOR DME holding patterns. The above graphic is the result of a recent project undertaken near Geneva. Swiss Control were able to utilise the power of the Wavionix hold design tool to rapidly explore which combination of altitude and airspeed would provide the optimum reduction in hold area to better utilise the available airspace.

Vertical Cut for Les Eplatures

This graphic shows the vertical cut for Les Eplatures, a high altitude aerodrome, which is located in the Jura mountain range.

The aerodrome level is depicted on the bottom line and the minimum altitude is shown on the white line, the green line indicates the lowest approach path. Lower sector are the Geneva sectors.

Obstacle CRM

This was a study on an area near Konstanz where 850 obstacles were listed. Using Wavionix an obstacle file was created automatically and this took a few hours to complete as opposed to a few days if working manually.

All obstacles are listed automatically

Obstacles can be rapidly identified graphically when the drawing is shaded.

New ILS Procedure at Berne Airport

Runway extensions have either been carried, or are about to be carried out at practically all Swiss aerodromes this means that all the procedures have had to be re-calculated.

This graphic is an example of this work on a new ILS procedure created for Berne airport to facilitate its new runway extension. Using Wavionix, all the aerodrome detail for Berne was placed on top of a digitised map (for copyright reasons we are unable to show map) to produce 3D faces. Any obstacle penetration underneath is then clearly identified.

WPD is regularly used in the department to draw different turns and to check procedures. This is when the PANS-OPS team really appreciate the time savings of using Wavionix software particularly as the manual calculation of a turn is a hard job to do properly because the likelihood of human error becomes greater as so many calculations have to be processed.

Kemit Holding

This hold was created using Wavionix to facilitate a low altitude climb between mountains. The graphic clearly shows the fixes and the VOR DME guidance.