Park home for air control

Press, 21 July 1988, Page 7

Park home for air control

By

NIGEL MALTHUS

The Airways Corporation has chosen the Canterbury Technology Park at Russley as the home of its new air traffic control centre for the southern part of New Zealand. Building will start in October for a completion date of July next year. The development, approved by the board of the Airways Corporation on Tuesday, will be part of a $7O million improvement of New Zealand’s air traffic control system by early 1991.

The $2.5 million building will house about $5.5 million worth of state-of-the-art display and communications equipment. Christchurch will also get $7 million worth of new primary and secondary radar systems, installed at the airport and at Airways’ existing communications installation on the Port Hills.

The Airways Corporation’s senior planning officer, Mr Jeff Scott, said

that air traffic control was now handled by centres at Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, and Ohakea airbase near Palmerston North.

Under the new system, the Wellington centre will be closed and Christchurch will control the airspace south of Otaki. Auckland will get a new centre to handle the sector from New Plymouth north.

Ohakea’s existing facilities will be improved to retain responsibility for the small area in between.

Mr Scott said that it would be more costeffective to close the Wellington centre and have its operations handled from Christchurch. New primary and secondary radars to be installed at Wellington would be linked into the Christchurch centre.

It “made sense” to build the centre at the Technology Park rather than the airport because

of its high-technology fibre-optic communication links and power supplies which could not be interrupted. The present centre is in rented space at Christchurch Airport, where space was at a premium. It was a common misconception that air traffic control had to be sited at airports, said Mr Scott. Although each airport would retain control tower staff managing aircraft movements on the ground and in the immediate area below 2000 ft, the control centre for the wider airspace could be “on the Chathams” provided suitable communications links were provided, he said.

The new system will introduce secondary radar to New Zealand. Primary radar gives the familiar “blip” on a screen, while secondary radar interrogates transponders aboard each aircraft for information such as its identity, altitude and speed. The

information appears in a caption beside each blip on the screen, simplifying the controller’s job.

Mr Scott said that the new system would allow each controller to handle more aircraft than the present system, which was outdated and included equipment up to 20 years old.

Airways expected that some of the Wellington staff would relocate to Christchurch, but Mr Scott said that he could not be specific about staffing requirements, which were still under discussion. The antenna for Christchurch’s secondary radar would be at Cass Peak on the Port Hills, where Airways already had aerials for communicating with aircraft. It would be housed in a small dome coloured to blend with the landscape, said Mr Scott. The present large rotating antenna for the primary radar at the airport would be replaced by a smaller version mounted on a tower, he said.