Cobham Aviation Services - Flight Inspection Services for the Airline Industry

Cobham delivers flight inspection services to customers throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa. With its thorough knowledge in flight inspection, alignment to ICAO recommendations and guidelines and its very broad international experience, Cobham is able to provide the customer with the highest quality service and advice available.

Flight inspection services for commercial aircraft

Cobham owns four king air specialist aircraft with dedicated flight inspection systems on board. Together with its staff and organisation, this makes Cobham the largest commercial flight inspection organisation in the world.

Cobham Flight Inspection (Cobham) comprises an operation at Durham Tees Valley Airport (DTV), UK and an operation in Braunschweig (Bwg), Germany (AFI Flight Inspection).

Flight inspection customers

Cobham customer's experience many benefits, including:

• Highest responsiveness and highest reliability in scheduling
• Measurements of highest accuracy and repeatability against national and international standards
• Immediate certification of their navigation facility
• Minimal interference with regular air traffic
• Minimal disturbance to airport neighbours
• A comprehensive range of calibration services, investigations and advice
• An internationally recognised organisation
• Full data and information report

Cobham's flight inspection customers include:

• NATS for regular flight inspection activities on UK airport navigation aids and UK en-route navigational aids
• UK MoD ADATS IPT, based at RAF Henlow, for regular flight checks of RAF, RN, and Army navigation aids
• The majority of the UK provincial and regional airports
• Irish Aviation Authority for all the navigation aids in Ireland
• The majority of the German regional airports
• Belgian Defence Forces
• Italian Air Force
• AENA - the Spanish air navigation service provider
• NAV EP - the Portuguese air navigation service provider
• Portuguese Air Force
• Bahrain Air Force and CAA
• United Arab Emirates
• Kuwait Air Force and CAA
• Egyptian CAA
• Yemen CAA
• Afghanistan ISAF bases

Flight inspection capability

Cobham conducts commissioning, return-to-service, engineering and periodic flight inspections in addition to trials work on a range of systems including, CAT I/II/III ILS, MLS, PAR, DVOR, NDB, U/VDF, TACAN, DME, AGL and PAPI and PSR/SSR.

The specialist capabilities include procedure validation, ADS-B and MLAT-systems, ship borne navaids, FI programme management, technical investigations, communication tests and trials, windfarm trials, flight inspection advice, and training.

Cobham has formal approvals from UK CAA Safety Regulation Group (CAP 670), UK MoD, INAC (Portugal), ENAV (Italy), British Standards Institute (BS EN ISO 9001:2008), Germany BAF, and Air Safety Support International OTAR for UK Overseas Territories.

Flight inspection personnel

Cobham has a policy of retaining a team of highly professional staff in order to guarantee the quality of its services. Its senior flight inspection personnel are recognised internationally for their technical competence and its team is second to none in Europe.

Aircraft with flight inspection systems

Cobham currently employs four aircraft: two beech king air B200 and two beech king 350. These are all equipped with aerodata flight inspection systems which allow comprehensive checking and calibration of radio and radar navigation aids, including ILS, MLS, DVOR, DME, NDB, TACAN, PAR, search radar, MSSR, and U/VDF.

All Cobham's aircraft are equipped with UHF RT communications to facilitate integration into a NATO military ATC environment.

Digital flight inspection systems

Cobham uses aerodata flight inspection systems for its work. These are highly integrated and fully digital flight inspection systems, which use real-time data processing and precision satellite navigation.

Several multi-tasking features allow Cobham to save flying time with the equipment and to maximise productivity of the flight inspection aircraft. High emphasis is placed on crew co-ordination in the flight inspection aircraft, which is assisted through flight inspection displays in the cockpit and via coupling to the autopilot.

The flight inspection procedures of the AD-FIS 9 and AD-AFIS 150 for the calibration of radio air navigation stations are based on the ICAO recommendations (ICAO Annex 10 and DOC 8071) and CAP 670. These also correspond to the requirements of NATO STANAG A Et P-1(D).