NAV CANADA Deploys Sensis Wide Area Multilateration for 2010 Winter Olympics Site

The Sensis WAM system will be operating to support safe aircraft operations between the Vancouver and Whistler Olympic venues, said John Crichton, NAV CANADA President and CEO. The sea-to-sky corridor is narrow and situated in difficult terrain with limited maneuvering space. The system will provide air traffic controllers an accurate picture of the traffic in this airspace increasing safety during this busy time.

The air flight corridor between Vancouver, the host city of the 2010 Winter Olympics and Pemberton, British Columbia, does not currently have low-altitude radar coverage for helicopter traffic. As the main mode of air transportation in that area, helicopter traffic is expected to increase leading up to the Winter games. With Sensis WAM, air traffic controllers will have continual, accurate surveillance of helicopters flying below 1,000 feet. Sensis wide area multilateration uses multiple low-maintenance, non-rotating sensors to triangulate aircraft and helicopter location based on transponder signals and to provide air traffic controllers with precise aircraft position and identification information regardless of weather conditions. With a higher update rate and greater positional accuracy than traditional radar, Sensis multilateration provides effective surveillance for increased safety, capacity and efficiency of airspace. With its advanced processing techniques, a Sensis multilateration system uses the minimal number of sensors for a less complex, lower lifecycle cost solution. Additionally, each multilateration sensor deployed by Sensis supports Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B), a technology that is being deployed by NAV CANADA to provide accurate coverage for en route surveillance. Wide area multilateration is a proven alternative to deploying costly en route radar, particularly in a challenging mountainous environment such as the Whistler area of British Columbia, said John Jarrell, vice president and general manager of Sensis Air Traffic Systems. Sensis WAM is also a more effective solution for this application, providing greater accuracy at lower flight levels commonly used by helicopters. Sensis continues to be the supplier of choice for multilateration and ADS-B solutions across Canada. Today, Sensis has deployed wide area terminal surveillance in Vancouver Harbor and Fort St. John, and is leading the roll-out of NAV CANADAs national ADS-B program with installations in Hudson Bay and along the Labrador and Baffin Island coasts of Eastern Canada. Additionally, NAV CANADA recently selected Sensis to provide multilateration for surface surveillance at Montreal Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport. Sensis is providing solutions to a number of WAM surveillance applications around the world, including precision runway monitoring (Detroit Metro Wayne County Airport, Michigan and Sydney Airport, Australia); terminal area surveillance (Innsbruck Airport, Austria, Vancouver Harbor and Fort St. John, Canada, Sydney Airport, Australia, King Abdulaziz International Airport and King Fahad International Airport, Saudi Arabia, Juneau, Alaska, and Colorado); special use airspace (29 Palms Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, California, U.S. Navy Patuxent River Naval Air Station, Maryland, and Yuma Proving Grounds, Arizona); and en route surveillance (Tasmania, Australia and the North Sea, United Kingdom).