Thales and BEST increase safety, capacity and efficiency of Beijing air traffic management

Thales and Beijing EasySky Technology (BEST), a joint venture between Thales and the Civil Aviation Air Traffic Control Technology & Equipment Development, have been selected by North China Air Traffic Management Bureau of Civil Aviation Administration of China, to automate the terminal maneuvering area, area control airspace and operations at Beijing Capital International Airport and the new Beijing Daxing International Airport. Air traffic in China is forecasted by the International Air Transportation Association to add another 758 million passengers, to its existing 440 million, over the next two decades, bringing the total number of annual passengers to 1.2 billion by 2034. To support this growth, China is embarking on airport construction and efficiency improvements to safely increase the number of flight arrivals and departures. The deployment of Thales TopSky-ATC, the most widely used air traffic automation system worldwide, will support this effort through seamless integration with the Beijing Area Control Center.The system features advanced redundant capability including complete flight plan fallback processing and flight plan synchronization, as well as multi-sensor processing and alerting to enable consistent operations during any main system outage or maintenance period. The airports’ and airspace traffic flows will be sequenced and balanced using MAESTRO, Thales’s fully integrated arrival and departure management system. MAESTRO will provide seamless integration between area control, approach control and tower systems – so all controllers will share the same sequence information and can manage airport configuration changes collaboratively, including Advanced Traffic Flow Management (ATFM) control times.