ITT has signed the first customer to receive air traffic surveillance data from its nascent automatic dependent surveillance - broadcast network in the USA, the first in what could be a long line of commercial data contracts the company says could generate tens of millions of dollars per year.

The company is under contract to the US Federal Aviation Administration to build and operate the ground infrastructure for ADS-B by 2013, portions of which are already in operation.

ITT proposed to sell the surveillance information in response to the FAA's request for ways to reduce service costs to operate the system.

"We recognised that when we submitted [the ADS-B] proposal to the Federal Aviation Administration that our architecture networked all of the surveillance data for the national airspace system," says John Kefaliotis, ITT director of ADS-B programmes.

Data, which includes airport radar surveillance in some locations, will be handled out of the company's Herndon, Virginia operations centre on a network that is isolated from the operational network.

Kefaliotis says the commercial network will support streaming of surveillance data, archival and retrieval and web-based visualisation that can be used for services such as fleet tracking, the desired option for the first customer. Although the customer has asked not to be identified, Kefaliotis says it is a "large aviation-related company".

Benefits of using ITT's ADS-B data over traditional radar-based information gathered by the FAA includes 1s update time, as opposed to 1 min updates, and the addition of surface data.

The precision allows ITT to provide "state vector" information, which can be used to calculate the rate than an aircraft is changing speed, turning, climbing or descending.

"That opens up the potential for other services," says Kefaliotis. Potential offerings include monitoring aircraft dynamics for analysis of how the vehicles are being flown, monitoring and identifying abnormal ADS-B airborne equipment.

Source: Flight Daily News

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