Case Study

Nationwide VCS virtual center provides reliability, innovation and flexibility

Airways New Zealand - quadredundant VCS architecture

Airways New Zealand provides air navigation and air traffic management consulting and training services in New Zealand and over 65 other countries. The state-owned enterprise handles over 780 million aircraft movements each year and has over 30 million square kilometers of airspace under its control.

Customer requirements
New Zealand is a challenging environment exposed to natural disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis. To keep the national airspace open when disaster strikes, flights must be able to take off and land at any time. As air navigation services providers (ANSP) for New Zealand, Airways needed a highly reliable system with significant increased resilience and unique geographic flexibility to manage their operations even in the event of large scale natural disasters.

Customer: Airways New Zealand
Project scope: Airways New Zealand selected a new nationwide ATC communications system based on its flexibility, scalability and reliability.
Task and requirement: The project involves close collaboration on various topics, such as human-machine interface design, control and monitoring of voice communications systems, system safety and integration with other systems.
Project duration: Multi-year project

Rohde & Schwarz solution

Rohde & Schwarz delivered an IP based voice communications system in a quad-redundant, distributed architecture to support the Airways New Zealand “one center – two locations” approach for highly resilient operations. The servers of the VCS are redundantly installed on both the North Island and South Island of the country. In the event of a natural disaster, one datacenter can take over for the other. The airspace can be transferred seamlessly between the ACC in Auckland and Christchurch.

The solution includes 150 CWP systems in Auckland and Christchurch (ACC, tower, training and simulation) and 112 compact CWPs for stand-by and training systems.

The IP design helps pool ATC resources in a virtual control center for improved airspace management with better utilization of human resources, greater employee satisfaction and higher profits.

The key features of CERTIUM® VCS
The CERTIUM® VCS is a flexible and cost-effective voice communications system that meets all ATC needs. It satisfies the established requirements for ATC availability, reliability and safety as well as the growing demand for dynamic ATC scenarios with network based sharing and distributed operational resources.

CERTIUM® VCS uses VoIP technology with SIP, RTP and R2S protocol support in line with the EUROCAE WG67 ED standard. The unique, centrally managed yet distributed architecture makes the system highly scalable, resilient, while remaining easy to manage and operate. It can be easily expanded by adding new devices to the network.

Security is very important for Rohde & Schwarz. The CERTIUM® VCS is strictly in line with the security-by-design approach. The system uses state-of-the art secure protocols and strong system hardening and continuous security process monitoring.

CERTIUM® VCS meets next generation ATC requirements such as asset sharing, facility consolidation, geographical distribution and remote tower technology, giving ANSP an effective solution for present and future global aviation safety and efficiency needs.

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For more than 35 years, Rohde & Schwarz has supported ATC customers across the world with a comprehensive range of solutions – even in challenging environments. More than 35 000 ATC radios and over 200 systems have been installed in more than 80 countries. Learn more about our successful longlasting customer relationships.

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