Last Resort system installed at Schiphol by SITTI

The Schiphol airport in Amsterdam (The Netherlands) is one of the busiest airports in the world, with over 50 million passengers transiting this airport in their tourism and business travels. The 6 airport runways allow a large number of flights to arrive and depart from/to all continents. Air Traffic Control the Netherlands (LVNL) is the ANSP (Air Navigation Service Provider) at Schiphol.

Safety is here a must: air traffic control shall be guaranteed in all circumstances, to allow a continuous orderly flow of aircrafts over this congested area. To ensure this in all circumstances, the voice management infrastructure of LVNL needs to be equipped with an emergency system to be used when the main and standby VCSs (voice communication systems) are for any reason not available.

The MULTIFONO® M800IP® Voice Switching System delivered by SITTI to LVNL is now extended to the remote sites of Eelde and Beek. For the implementation of a Centralised Base LVNL WAN connections are used to reach local radios from Schiphol. Since these latter are analogue receivers and transmitters, proper VoIP gateways by SITTI (named GVS) are installed at those sites to allow conversion of analogue signals to the standard ATC/ATM protocol, in conformance to EUROCAE ED-137.

The emergency system installed at Schiphol is called LRRTS (Last Resort Radio Telephone System): it allows operators to access local and remote radio and telephone resources in emergency conditions to assure the proper landing and departing of aircrafts, thus not creating a blocking situation that may result being very dangerous. The extension allows up to 10 controllers to access to local and remote radio and telephone links through dedicated panels.

Site acceptance test of this system is expected to take place in next July.