Eight ASECNA African Nations to advance aeronautical communication with FREQUENTIS Comsoft

ASECNA, the Agency for the Safety of Air Navigation in Africa and Madagascar, has selected the advanced aviation message handling system (AMHS) from Frequentis Comsoft to enhance message handling for eight African countries.

Cote d’Ivoire, Central African Republic, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Cameroon, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and Comoros will all benefit from the most advanced upgrade of their outdated legacy AFTN (aeronautical fixed telecom network) messaging service with an innovative, fully integrated SITA/AFTN/ AMHS messaging technology, which allows the harmonised operation of all messaging services in one application. This marks a major step in the modernisation of each country’s international communication centre, as well as of the domestic messaging infrastructure, in line with the latest ICAO AMHS standards.

In addition, the delivered systems provide new major functionalities incorporating the AMHS/SOAP gateway and ICAO FPL/FIXM and TAC/iWXXM converters. This will enable ASECNA to smoothly migrate to new technologies for reporting weather information and a future SWIM-based environment.

ASECNA is undergoing a program to modernise airspace facilities in all 17 of its member countries. Frequentis Comsoft was selected to complete the modernisation of the afore mentioned eight countries based on its experience and technical ability, having the most integrated and mature AFTN/AMHS solution available on the market. This will not only guarantee a stable and reliable messaging service for several member states, but also open the migration path to the future SWIM-based environment.

“We are pleased to be adding ASECNA to our list of AMHS customer, bringing modern airspace communications to the region. Frequentis Comsoft’s is proud to be continuously adding to the 65 already satisfied AMHS customers worldwide, proving that the quality and reliability of our AMHS system is well recognised in the industry. We look forward to enhancing message handling for ASECNA.”, says Thomas Hoffmann, Frequentis Comsoft Managing Director.

Frequentis Comsoft’s AIDA-NG, is a unified message handling switch enabling SITA, AFTN, Common ICAO Data Interchange Network (CIDIN), and AMHS messages to be exchanged, based on the European ATM Communication Gateway (ECG) software. High message loads do not affect the exceptional response time of the management interface. Overload situations are prevented by extensive flow control mechanisms. Excellent performance and operational service availability are guaranteed.