Indra Navia has recently completed a successful interoperability test for the NORMARC Ground Based Augmentation System (GBAS) against an airborne receiver for Category III approaches. Funded by the SESAR Community and EUROCONTROL under SESAR project 15.3.6, Indra Navia has developed a prototype CAT III GBAS ground station. This is an important milestone in the first stage of the project, which will result in installing and validating the prototype at Frankfurt Airport.

The NORMARC 8100 GBAS is a new satellite-based landing system, with an architecture that is well suited to comply with ICAO’s GAST D requirements. GBAS allows for increased air traffic capacity, provides noise abatement and accommodates flexible operations such as curved approaches and landing on close parallel runways.

"This project is progressing as planned. We were very pleased to demonstrate to Deutsche Flugsicherung and EUROCONTROL that the functionality of the NORMARC GBAS exceeds expectations," comments Eldar Hauge, President & CEO of Indra Navia.

Indra Navia’s industry-leading culture of technical excellence and focus on innovation has led a natural development from the industry benchmark NORMARC ILS systems to the world’s first successfully certified and installed satellite landing system, SCAT-I, now in use at airports around Norway.

Based on its experience in providing approach and landing solutions at more than 1000 runway-ends, Indra Navia has designed the NORMARC GBAS for extremely high stability. Although the validation of performance requirements is a part of the next phase of the project, the results so far already indicate that the strict requirements of ICAO GAST D are achievable.