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UK airspace classification - CAA to get new powers

When you’re over the sea you’re still visible to multiple MLAT antenna sites. You don’t have to be “inside” the perimieter of antennas to be seen by enough of them.

Andreas IOM

alioth wrote:

We recently commissioned MLAT here

How do they make it work for a/c over the sea? Do they have receiver in England and NI ?

Nympsfield, United Kingdom

MattL wrote:

ATC can provide a traffic service on SSR only but that is a degraded service and you will get the appropriate caveats on RT; it can’t be certified as a primary capability.

Interesting - in Sweden ATC has for a long time (decades) been operating without any PSR stations at all. Now some PSR stations are being reintroduced, partly because of the increasing amount of nontransponding military traffic over the Baltic.

ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden

ATC can provide a traffic service on SSR only but that is a degraded service and you will get the appropriate caveats on RT; it can’t be certified as a primary capability.

Gloucester radar was an old ships radar I seem to recall being told by one of the ATCOs there?

Under Project MARSHALL the RAF is moving to centralised radar centres and a lot of airfields will be Tower only, there is real potential for joined up and centralised wide area lower airspace radar services in the U.K. but I don’t know if it will ever happen.

Posts are personal views only.
Oxfordshire, United Kingdom

Reportedly – and nobody who actually knows is ever going to confirm this openly – NATS charge something like 50-100k/year for a radar feed. It would not surprise me if you can buy a secondhand radar and a service contract for that much.

Anyway, for say 16hrs/day usage, the cost of the required number of radar qualified ATCOs, assistants, and related fixed costs will be at least as much, and you need them to be able to legally see a radar display regardless of where it comes from.

Also, tower radars have quite a small range – of the order of 30nm. I don’t know if this is real or regulatory, but that is the sort of limit for getting a service.

Also, it has been the case in the UK (not sure if it still is; recently one ATCO claimed it isn’t) that for a traffic or deconfliction service they had to see both your primary and SSR returns. SSR-only was no good, even though SSR works over a much longer range, potentially.

The above rules will likely be in the airport’s MATS Part 2 manual which is confidential.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

What about – at least for SSR – blanketing the country with MLAT secondary radar?

We recently commissioned MLAT here – there is no longer a spinning antenna on the Isle of Man for SSR. The MLAT is far better than the old system, because it provides coverage in areas that used to be blanked by terrain, because it’s practical to put antenna sites all over the place as each antenna is a (in aviation radar terms) a low cost, low maintenance installation, versus the very high cost and maintenance of a rotating antenna.

But that would of course required joined-up thinking, rather than each ATSU being an independent fiefdom.

Andreas IOM

Airborne_Again wrote:

Is that also an effect of the privatised system?

Quite possibly. But there are also technical reasons.
There is a tradeoff between range and refresh rate.
The surveillance minimal altitude is lower close the radar and you need to be able to vector low aircraft near the airport. So sharing a radar between Heathrow and Northolt, yes possible. Between Bristol and Gloucester, I don’t think it would be possible.

Nympsfield, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

AFAIK, in the UK, almost every airport with CAS and “airline” traffic has on-site radar.

Is that also an effect of the privatised system? I mean as opposed to having strategically placed radar sites across the country and having a mosaic radar feed to every ATC unit?

Last Edited by Airborne_Again at 03 Dec 16:08
ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden

It is not somewhat outdated to have actual localised radars at different sites owned by different entities to fulfill various different requirements according to what they can afford or wish to purchase? I find it depressing and rather third-world when LARS controllers tell me the traffic information will be reduced due to limits of cover.

Would a modern fit-for-purpose system not be a properly-designed network of radars to provide coverage across the entire country, with the data piped around the country so that each ATCO can see the bit her or she needs, or should the need arise, any other bit?

EGLM & EGTN

Jujupilote wrote:

Who owns the radars ? CAA or NATS ?

Approach radars (like Bristol or Gloucester) are owned by the airport, en-route radars are owned by NERL

I guess they were built with taxpayer’s money.

All the one built before 1998 (the privatisation), yes.
I don’t know if there has been any modernisation or new radar sites in the last 20 years

Nympsfield, United Kingdom
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