Alan George/LONDON
The UK's key new air-traffic-control (ATC) centre at Swanwick in southern England is facing further serious delays which could result in the New En Route Centre (NERC) not becoming operational until late 1999.
The £350 million ($570 million) centre being built by US contractor Lockheed Martin is already 15 months behind schedule because of earlier software problems. Under a revised plan, the NERC, which is vital to meeting the fast-increasing air-traffic flow over England and Wales, was to have become operational in March 1998, rather than the original start date of December 1996.
Now senior management at the National Air Traffic Services (NATS) subsidiary of the UK Civil Aviation Authority have decided that the March 1998 date is not achievable and is considering options on how to get the NERC into operation as fast as possible after that date. Options are now under consideration and the CAA board is expected to be presented with the revised scheme by August.
New NATS chief executive Bill Semple says: "We are keen to come up with options on how to proceed by September." He declines to name a new operational date beyond saying that it would be "the winter of 1998/9 at the earliest".
It is believed, however, that some senior managers are talking about late 1999/early 2000 as being a more realistic start date.
NATS says that the reason for the delay is that tests on the completed systems at Swanwick have shown that "additional functionality" is required at the centre before it becomes operational. Semple says that the extra work has been agreed with the contractor and comes within the overall budget.
Although Lockheed Martin declines to comment publicly, the contractor claims that it has been meeting its performance milestones, despite suggestions that software problems persist.
Training ATC operators to use the NERC has also been an issue. NATS admitted earlier this year that the system had to be debugged by June to leave sufficient time for controllers to be trained on the new system. The new delays will give NATS some breathing space on its training-programme schedule, although even this will be hindered until the extra technical features are added by Lockheed Martin. The US contractor recently secured a Private Finance Initiative deal to build a £250 million New Scottish Centre planned for Prestwick, near Glasgow, for NATS.
Semple, who became the NATS boss on 1 July when Derek McLauchlan retired, says that the new delays will add a further "£6-7 million" to the costs of continuing to run the London Area and Terminal Control Centre (LATCC) at West Drayton,near London Heathrow. The LATCC will start to run down once the NERC becomes operational.The earlier delays have already cost NATS £10 million to maintain LATCC's effectiveness.
Source: Flight International
