NATS’ Swanwick Centre, near Fareham in Hampshire is one of the largest and most advanced air traffic control centre in the world. It entered operational service on 27 January 2002 when it began handling aircraft flying over England and Wales. Previously, this traffic was being controlled by staff in the area control operations room at West Drayton.
The introduction of Swanwick signalled a change in the way controllers work. In the area control operations room at West Drayton, traffic in each sector was controlled by a small team of controllers, comprising a single tactical controller dedicated to each airspace sector, overseen by a chief sector controller position which acted in a coordination role. Swanwick, however, has two controllers per sector – the tactical controller and a dedicated planner controller overseen by a local area supervisor and supported by an assistant.
Through increased planning and coordination, planner controllers are able to resolve potential conflicts in advance, thereby reducing the workload of tactical controllers.
Swanwick Factfile
The Operation:
Swanwick controls 200,000 square miles of airspace above England and Wales – among the busiest and most complex in the world – with the exception of London and south-east area below 24,000 feet and the Manchester area below 21,000 feet.
357 civil controllers, 170 civil assistants, 35 operational engineers, 47 specialist engineers and 35 military ATC staff (644 in total) have been trained to operate and maintain the system. Of the 357 civil controllers, 93 have also taken on extra training for supervisory duties.
This airspace is split into more than 30 flight levels each separated by 1,000 feet in height.
On a busy summer’s day, the area control operation handles up to 6,000 flights.
The Operations Room measures 2,000 square metres, half the size of a Premier League football pitch, larger than ten tennis courts, and three times the size of the room it replaces.
The computer system has more than two million lines of software code – one of the most sophisticated IT projects in the country - representing over 3,300 functions, using 23 sub-systems connected by over 30 miles of cable (sufficient on its own to reach from London to Guildford), supplying information to over 200 workstations.
650,000 hours of testing has been conducted on the system.
Radar information is fed into the Swanwick system from nine sites in the UK.
500 telephone lines are used to support the operations.
The Centre expects to be continuously operational 24 hours per day, 365 days a year for the next 30+ years.
The Centre:
Is the largest purpose-built air traffic centre in the world, it...
Took 5.25 million man hours to construct
Was the largest construction project in Britain at the time
Has a floor area of 63,000 square metres – larger than most London department stores
Contains some 400 miles of power and signal cable – enough to reach from London to Glasgow
Has 44 miles of pipework (would reach to Guildford from Brighton)
Has 23 miles of ducting (would stretch across Yorkshire from Leeds to York)
Has two five-megawatt standby generators in case of power failure – each sufficient to power two villages or a small town.
Has 1000 smoke detectors and 500 manual fire alarm call points
Is divided into compartments separated by walls giving two hours fire resistance.
Will maintain a constant temperature of 22 degrees inside through an outside temperature range from –10 to over +30 degrees.
Controller Training:
The training programme took two man-years to prepare and involved over 21,000 individual assignments
Each controller spent 170 hours training on the Swanwick systems
It was one of the largest training programmes in the history of air traffic control.
Project Milestones:
- 1990 (Jan-Feb): Two sites identified near Fareham, Hants for new en-route ATC centre (voted by West Drayton controllers as their preferred location).
- 1992 (Oct): £132.9m system development contract awarded to IBM. Delivery Nov 1995. ‘O’ date Nov/Dec 1996. (NB. IBM was bought by Loral in 1994.)
- 1994 (Nov): Swanwick Centre building handed over to NATS by the Building Design Partnership.
- 1995 (June) US Federal Aviation Administration cancels 20-centre Advanced Automation System – on which the Swanwick software development is based.
- 1996 (Mar) Loral bought by Lockheed Martin – Swanwick computer contract moves.
- 1997 (Sept): Swanwick software project subsequently replanned to incorporate additional functions and allow more time for testing and training. ‘O’ date now November 1999.
- 1998 (April): System acceptance tests successfully completed. ‘O’ date revised to Winter 1999/2000.
- 1998 (Nov): The Government’s technical audit (the DERA Report) says ‘Swanwick will work’ and suggests likely new ‘O’date of Winter 2001/2.
- 1999 (Feb): NATS Board approves revised ‘Plan to Completion’ including confirmed ‘O’ date of Winter 2001/2.
- 1999 (March) Swanwick’s Technical Transfer completed to revised schedule.
- 2000 (July) NATS Board confirms ‘O’ date of 27 January 2002.
- 2000 (Dec) Technical Handover completed on schedule.
- 2001 (Feb) Controller operational conversion training begins.
- 2001 (Dec) Operational handover completed to schedule.
- 2002 (Jan) Swanwick Centre enters operational service.
