Thales U.K. was awarded a contract to supply a Wide-Area Multilateration (WAM) system to the U.K.’s National Air Traffic Services (NATS). The company said this is to be a trial system to allow NATS Research & Development to investigate the operational capabilities of Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) and WAM to support its future en-route surveillance strategy. This is a project that NATS will run in partnership with the Eurocontrol CASCADE program through its CRISTAL U.K. 3 project.
The project will include a six-sensor active WAM/ADS-B system located around London and covering the airports of Heathrow, Gatwick, London City, Luton and Stansted. This will be used to validate the new technology against a proven radar surveillance picture. The system will use existing NATS sites and infrastructure to allow data to be collected and processed at the central processing station based at NATS Corporate Technical Centre (CTC) at Southampton, Thales said.