ENAIRE commissions a new state-of-the-art voice communications system at the Balearic Air Traffic Control Centre

ENAIRE, Spain's air navigation manager, has deployed the new dual Voice over IP (Internet Protocol) communication system called COMETA at its Balearic Control Centre.

COMETA provides ENAIRE with greater resilience capacity, ensuring service continuity in degraded scenarios and improving communication quality

This system enhances the robustness of radio communications (pilot-controller) and telephony (controller-controller), providing ENAIRE with greater resilience capacity to ensure service continuity in degraded scenarios and maintain communication quality.

With this deployment at the Balearic Control Centre, completed on 20 May, ENAIRE has now installed the new Voice over IP communication systems (COMETA) at all its air traffic control centres. Moreover, its future implementation is planned at the Málaga approach control facility to replace the current communication systems.

Throughout the process of implementing COMETA in the different control centres, air navigation managers from several countries have shown an interest in this ENAIRE system.

What is COMETA?

The COMETA voice communication system was developed to replace its predecessor (the SDC-91 system) and to enable the transition to VoIP (Voice over IP) technology in a way that is completely transparent to controllers. It features a design aimed at ensuring service continuity and communication quality, complying with regulatory standards for voice communications over IP protocol (IETF, EUROCAE, EUROCONTROL, ITU). 

 As a result, COMETA:

- Improves the audio quality perceived by controllers for voice communications.

- Reduces the maintenance costs of the system itself by eliminating hardware elements, integrating the use of COTS hardware, and allowing access to ENAIRE’s air navigation data network instead of dedicated lines.

- Makes it feasible to add new functions into voice communications, allowing new features to be incorporated into air traffic management systems.

- Contributes to dynamic airspace sectorisation projects and SATVOICE (satellite voice) communications.

The change required an extensive period of validation, updating, and adjustments in the voice communications network to ensure interoperability between the different voice communication systems, IP radios, and voice-over-IP gateways (which convert voice formats from analogue to digital).

[ENAIRE has already implementd the COMETA system in all its control centers].