Thales and BEST increase safety, capacity and efficiency of Beijing air traffic management

Key Points

• Thales and BEST will automate the terminal manoeuvring area, area control airspace and operations at two major Beijing airports.
• Thales TopSky-ATC and MAESTRO will assist in safely increasing the number of flight arrivals and departures.
• Thales is the largest air traffic management supplier in China – China uses Thales ATC systems to manage 60% of the country's air traffic.

Thales and Beijing EasySky Technology Ltd. (BEST), a joint venture between Thales and the Civil Aviation Air Traffic Control Technology & Equipment Development Co. Ltd., have been selected by North China Air Traffic Management Bureau of Civil Aviation Administration of China, to automate the terminal manoeuvring area, area control airspace and operations at Beijing Capital International Airport and the new Beijing Daxing International Airport.

Air traffic in China is forecasted by the International Air Transportation Association to add another 758 million passengers, to its existing 440 million, over the next two decades, bringing the total number of annual passengers to 1.2 billion by 2034. To support this growth, China is embarking on airport construction and efficiency improvements to safely increase the number of flight arrivals and departures. The deployment of Thales TopSky-ATC, the most widely used air traffic automation system in the world, will support this effort through seamless integration with the Beijing Area Control Center. The system features advanced redundant capability including complete flight plan fallback processing and flight plan synchronization, as well as multi-sensor processing and alerting to enable consistent operations during any main system outage or maintenance period.

The airports’ and airspace traffic flows will be sequenced and balanced using MAESTRO, Thales’s fully integrated arrival and departure management system. MAESTRO will provide seamless integration between area control, approach control and tower systems – so all controllers will share the same sequence information and can manage airport configuration changes collaboratively, including Advanced Traffic Flow Management (ATFM) control times. Additionally, it will support the integration of required arrival delay absorption into sector displays to enable efficient traffic sequencing and reduced airborne holding. Further, advanced runway allocation processing will enable efficient airline operations and reduce taxi times.

This latest modernization project will be completed in 2019. The project is an extension of Thales’s commitment to partnering with the ATMB to create China’s next generation Air Traffic Control (ATC) system. China uses Thales ATC systems to manage 60% of the country's air traffic.  As the largest air traffic management supplier in China, Thales has deployed 39 radar systems, 11 ATC automation systems (including 5 provided by BEST), and more than 550 Navaids, as well as Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) and multilateration systems.