INEO E&S and SITTI with ASECNA for a safer sky!

ASECNA has recently awarded SITTI with a contract for the provision of 3 new Voice Communication Systems (VCS) for the capital cities of Burkina Faso, Congo Brazzaville and Niger. ASECNA (acronym for Agence pour la Sécurité de la Navigation Aérienne en Afrique et à Madagascar, i.e. the Agency for Air Navigation Safety in Africa and Madagascar) is an international public organization composed of 18 Member States. Created in 1959 and based in Dakar-Senegal, its mission is to provide air navigation services, aeronautical information services and aeronautical meteorology services to the airspace under the jurisdiction of its Member States and the oceanic airspace in central Atlantic Ocean, Gulf of Guinea and Indian Ocean.

The MULTIFONO® M800IP® system by SITTI has been chosen as the backup VCS system for equipping the Air Traffic Control facilities respectively in Ouagadougou, Brazzaville, Niamey. The three systems are quite similar to each other. They constitute of analogue connections to existing radios plus a standard ED-137 interface to the most recent technological VOIP solution; analogue telephone links to currently available lines are further enhanced by a standard VOIP telephone interface compliant to the ED-137 EUROCAE standard. All systems are also provided with 16 Controller Working Positions (CWP) to give controllers easy and intuitive access to all radio and telephone facilities needed to safely accomplish their important job for making flights safer.

The VCS delivered by SITTI is used as a backup to the three new main VCS AIRvoice full-IP ED-137 designed, manufactured and delivered by INEO E&S, a company of EQUANS France, for ASECNA ACCs together with three AIRvoice VCS systems dedicated to HF telecommunications. Such VCS redundant and fault tolerant architecture enables safe and full 7/ 24 ATM operation. INEO E&S is the main contractor of this contract and performs the programme management, commissioning, on site deployment and the logistics support, SITTI being a co-contractor.

A semi-automatic solution has been implemented to allow the local maintenance teams to easily move from the main to the backup system in a very short time. Other interesting functions included are the radio Best Signal Selection (BSS) capability and redundancy features to guarantee a continuous workflow even in case of failures, according to the fault-tolerant general principle of SITTI systems (no single point of failure).