Fully in line with the industry’s specifications and schedule, Belgocontrol’s innovative system for automated aeronautical communication (ISAAC) demonstrated its maturity and readiness for operational service in meticulously accomplished acceptance and reliability tests. Based at Brussels International Airport, the system not only acts as a national and international distributor of flight plans, meteorological information and NOTAMs over the AFTN, CIDIN and AMHS network, but also provides an OLDI communication hub for air traffic management systems.

Taking into account the commission regulation’s EC 633/2007 request for all European air traffic management systems to manage their OLDI communication applying the FMTP / IPv6 protocol as of April 2011, the ISAAC system brings another advantage: its unprecedented and sophisticated OLDI FDE / FMTP gateway functionality developed by COMSOFT allows operating existing OLDI implementations beyond the stipulated date. Moreover, it enables Belgocontrol to refrain from investment costs induced by the new FMTP standard.

The ISAAC system with its fundamental communication means that the Belgian ATC service provider has undoubtedly evolved to one of the most modern and powerful message handling solutions providers worldwide. The system clearly benefits from its core component AIDA-NG, which is COMSOFT’s renowned aeronautical messaging solution. Over the past few years, AIDA-NG has taken the lead on this competitive market combining AMHS, CIDIN, AFTN, OLDI communication facilities on a unified platform. ISAAC also offers ATN directory services according to the X.500 standard in support of the extended AMHS service.

Flight plans and other aeronautically relevant messages can be sent, received and managed via the easy to use terminal system CADAS with its nationally distributed AMHS user agents. In order to guarantee full service availability at all time ISAAC’s operational services can be transferred automatically to a remote contingency system in case of a failure of the main communication center.

To simplify the supervision of the overall system ISAAC includes COMSOFT’s network management system (CNMS) allowing for central monitoring of all integrated components in a hierarchical way.

With the operational cutover scheduled for January 2011 the system will receive its finishing touch.

Interoperability tests with adjacent AMHS partners are already planned for the following weeks and months. As in this regard, Belgocontrol benefits from the fact that nearly all international communication partners are members of the COMSOFT AMHS user group (CAUG) and are thus also prepared for conducting these tests. The annual CAUG conference has established to a common ground for participants to advance the introduction of AMHS and discuss related operational implications.

Both COMSOFT’s and Belgocontrol’s project teams are enthusiastic about the accomplished milestone and remaining steps. The success of this complex project so far can be traced back to an outstanding collaboration between the two partners.