A long time to get airborne

The air traffic control centre at Swanwick in Hampshire finally becomes operational this weekend, ending one of the most embarrassing episodes in government IT history.

The centre will cover all of England and Wales except of London and Manchester, and should be capable of handling 30 per cent more flights. It is expected to have a 30-year life.

The new system automatically informs controllers when planes are moving into their airspace, replacing the old telephone system.

It also introduces new conflict-alert systems, although in the short-term air traffic controllers will still use paper flight strips as a backup system.

On his appointment last August, National Air Traffic Services (Nats) chairman Chris Gibson-Smith said: 'Getting the future of the air traffic systems right for Britain is a vital modernisation task. It requires the best technology, substantial investment, first-rate teamwork, and an absolute commitment to safety.'

Since March 1999, the system has been through 450,000 hours of testing of two million lines of code, and since January 2001, 600 air traffic controllers and support staff have been trained to run the systems.

Software problems and over-ambitious timeframes dogged the project.

The original contract was signed in 1992 with IBM to go live in 1996, but IBM were replaced with Loral in 1994 and then by Lockheed Martin in 1996.

Some £480m was spent before Nats accepted the system from developer Lockheed Martin - roughly on budget. But another £180m was added to the cost through additional work and maintenance of the site before it become operational.

A report by consultants Arthur D Little, commissioned by the government in 1999, said: 'The key reasons for the increase in project cost relative to the original budget are amendments to the systems implementation contract and under-estimation of the scope and timing of the transition phase.'

The Arthur D Little report said that day-to-day management of the project was good but that the main reason for the delays was Nats' failure to recognise that the system could not be delivered within six years.

While Swanick was being built, there were also problems with the existing systems: In the summer of 2000 a software upgrade caused a glitch which grounded thousands of travellers for four hours.

But even after the system was delivered, additions had to be made: 'No system stands still and we've had record flight levels, and we've had to develop the existing flight centres to cope. When we do that we have to reconfigure the Swanwick systems,' a Nats spokesman told Computing.

'We want the system to bed in, so we have imposed some short-term capacity limits. For the first 10 days we will operate a level 30 per cent less than a peak summer day. But we don't expect that many flights as it is the quietest time of the year. We will gradually step up over the next 60 days.'

After all the controversy, there will be no ribbon-cutting or official launch. The system should become operational quietly around 3am on Sunday. 'We might tell the first pilot he is using the new system, but that will be it,' said the Nats spokesman.

But even now, with Swanwick behind it, Nats' IT problems may not be over. In March 2001, EDS began legal action against Nats for £43m in damages over the cancellation of a satellite-based air navigation system for the UK. The project was to build a system at Prestwick air traffic control centre in Scotland, now expected to go live in 2009.