ERA will provide surface surveillance for Pudong airport in Shanghai

ERA Company announced that had been awarded a contract to deploy its surface multilateration system at Pudong International Airport in Shanghai, China. The contract was assigned by East China Regional Air Traffic Management Bureau of Civil Aviation of China. ERA will provide the MLAT and ADS-B part of the A-SMGCS system and cooperate on the project with Chinese company Nanjing LES Information Technology, which is supposed to deliver surface movement radar and data fusion and display systems.

Shanghai as well as other important Chinese cities has rapidly ascended in the rankings of the world's busiest airports over the past decade. To accommodate the growing traffic volume and still keep the safety issues up to date in the face of this rapid expansion Chinese ATM officials decided to research systems which could leverage next-generation technologies to provide a complete solution for both parallel runway monitoring and surface surveillance, as well as future-proof their investment in this surveillance infrastructure at Pudong. The precision runway monitoring (PRM) system was necessary due to the three parallel runways there.

Within last year East China Regional Air Traffic Management Bureau of Civil Aviation of China evaluated ATC solution providers and selected the team of Nanjing LES Information Technology and ERA as a subcontractor to deliver A-SMGCS systemincluding ERA MLAT system with full ADS-B reception, decoding and transmitting capabilities. The ERA solution is designed to provide surface surveillance as well as precision runway monitoring by utilizing two “NEO by ERA” networks of sensors. “The specific requirements for the surface and PRM systems for Pudong airport were stringent and demanding in terms of accuracy, coverage and redundancy but the solution design proposed by ERA met the end user´s requirements and hence ERA has won the tender,” stated ERA Managing Director Viktor Sotona.

ECRAF selected LES as the prime contractor to deliver the system, based on its track record of success in integrating component technologies to offer a turnkey air traffic control solution, and chose two NEO by ERA composite systems, based on the company´s proven surface and wide area multilateration solutions and built in ADS-B technology. The proposed surveillance system for the Pudong airport surface management is based on central time architecture and should consist of 30 receiving stations, the PRM system consisting of 5 WAM sites will be located out of the airport premises and shall use the distributed time architecture.

The system will provide Shanghai Airport Authority air traffic controllers with uninterrupted identification of aircraft and equipped vehicles and the surface sensors will cover all manoeuvring areas. The project is expected to be completed by 2016 and provide higher accuracy, a greater update rate, better coverage and improved reliability when compared to traditional radar technology, as well as dramatically lower initial and maintenance costs.

Shanghai Pudong International Airport is the primary international airport serving Shanghai area and a major aviation hub for Asia. Pudong airport has two main passenger terminals, flanked on both sides by three parallel runways. It is a fast-growing hub for both passenger and cargo traffic. The airport has been ranked the world's third busiest airport by cargo traffic. It served a total of 52 million passengers in 2014, making it the third busiest airport in mainland China and the 19th busiest in the world.