Two new airports given go ahead in Djibouti

Djibouti's President, Ismaïl Omar Guelleh, has laid the first stones of two new airports as part of the country's infrastructure development drive.

The airports are being built at a combined cost of US$599 million and it expected to transform Djibouti into a regional travel, tourism and business hub for Africa. Together the airports will cater for over two million passengers and over 100,000 tons of air cargo, and create 2,000 jobs.
Moussa Ahmed Hassan, Djibouti’s Minister for Equipment and Transport, said: “The investment in transport infrastructure in Djibouti will act as a catalyst for economic growth and development. The airports form part of the major transport infrastructure investment programme, enabling the country to build on its position as a key regional trade hub.”
The two new international airports will complement Djibouti’s existing U$5 billion, multiple seaport investment plan. Djibouti will start work on liquefied-natural-gas and crude-oil terminals in 2015, which will add to four new ports already being built that will quadruple cargo handling to almost 80 million metric tons annually. The direct rail link to Addis Ababa is also currently under construction and will be completed this year.
Planned to go operational in 2018, the first airport, named Hassan Gouled Aptidon International Airport after Djibouti’s first president, is being built in Ali-Sabieh, 25km south of the capital. It will be capable of catering for 1.5 million passengers and 100,000 tons of air cargo per year. The airport will accommodate all modern commercial aircraft including the giant Airbus 380.
The second airport, Ahmed Dini Ahmed International Airport, named after the former prime minister, is located in the north of Djibouti and is designed to handle up to 767,400 passengers per year. It is expected to open its doors in 2016. The two new airports will create approximately 2,000 jobs during construction and operation.
The China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation is providing financial support for the project.
Djibouti is making significant strides in the development of its sea, air, road and rail infrastructure. It is developing rail links, oil pipelines and other infrastructure as it seeks to become a middle-income country by 2035. The economy is forecast by the World Bank to grow 6.5 per cent in 2015, the highest estimates for the whole of the MENA region

Spanish budget carrier stretches African network to Accra

Spanish low cost carrier Vueling – an IAG subsidiary - is to begin a weekly flight to Accra from its main base in Barcelona.

This is part of an expansion of its African network which also includes additional routes to Morocco and Tunisia.
The weekly flight to the Ghana capital will be the airline’s longest flight at nearly 4,000km.
In June, it will also begin twice-weekly flights to the Tunisian island of Djerba and to Rabat, Morocco's capital.
All three new destinations will be served from Rabat Vueling’s base at Barcelona’s El Prat airport.

NASA Advances Single-Pilot Operations Concepts

NASA is advancing an airliner flight deck of the future that features one seat in the cockpit for a captain and one on the ground, occupied by an operator filling the role of either “super dispatcher” or first officer. The research, while rife with political and public ramifications that could far outweigh the technical challenges, is far less science fiction than it was three years ago.

At NASA’s Ames Research Center, where researchers are unencumbered by present day mores, a third major study (SPO-3) since the research began in earnest in 2011 did not reveal any showstoppers. The project gained new momentum in May, when the center awarded a one-year contract to an industry team led by avionics and data link provider Rockwell Collins to further the concept. 

Under the single-pilot understanding for distributed simulations program, the team will research the crew capacity, ground and flight deck resource management, physiological monitoring technologies and automation needed to make SPO viable, in addition to addressing technical, certification and policy issues that will emerge. Rockwell Collins will also use its live, virtual and constructive technologies to enable distributed simulations of SPO, in which participants will use a mix of simulators—and potentially, in five years, live aircraft—in dispersed geographic regions to test a scenario. The company will also experiment with its voice input and synthesis technologies for the workstation.

The state of the art in SPO is a product of nearly 20 years of foundational research on distributed flight deck operations work begun in the mid-1990s with NASA’s advanced air traffic management concepts for “Free Flight,” a system that would allow airlines to choose their own flight paths. Research was directed at “human-centered, error-tolerant automation” to enable decision-making between pilots, controllers, and dispatchers for gate-to-gate planning.

Although Free Flight in the early 2000s evolved into the FAA’s NextGen program, ideas developed in that era on how to better share workload between the air and the ground directly contributed to NASA’s latest generation SPO concept of operations (conops), which 30 commercial airline flight crews evaluated during a one-month simulation atNASA Ames in July and August 2014. 

In SPO-3, the conops revolved around a specialized two-position ground control station where the operator when sitting in the right seat fills the role of “super dispatcher” for as many as 12 single-pilot airliners in cruise flight. If one of the 12 aircraft enters an “off-nominal” state due to an issue or anomaly, the ground station operator moves to the left seat and becomes a ground-based first officer dedicated to that aircraft. NASA’s Langley Research Center is focused on the airborne solutions for SPO. NASA decided to keep the ground station separate from air traffic control. “We conceived this as a way of supporting operations from the airlines’ perspective,” says Walt Johnson, research psychologist and lead for the flight deck display research laboratory at NASA Ames. “Everything that we are doing is trying to keep this as transparent and seamless to air traffic control as possible. It’s a big challenge to try and add or change air traffic control roles.”

Why 12 aircraft per super dispatcher? Johnson says researchers arrived at that number by visiting airline operations centers and talking to dispatchers, watching the number of aircraft they handle on a daily basis. An important part of the SPO-3 study was to find out “whether we should start out with pilots or whether we should start with dispatchers (for the ground operator) and what are the required skills,” says Vernol Battiste, a senior research psychologist with San Jose State University working on the project. Pilots in the previous study, SPO-2, made their desires clear. “I need someone on dedicated support that has been where I’ve been, that can feel what I feel and know what the issues are,” says Battiste of the pilots’ input. “We decided to go with pilots initially and train them to be dispatchers.” Battiste says the amount of dispatcher knowledge needed for the study was “relatively modest.”

NASA’s SPO ground station includes a super dispatcher position on the right and a first officer position on the left. Credit: John Croft/AW&ST

The NASA SPO ground station provides the connectivity, tools and situational awareness aids that allow the operator in the super dispatcher role to manage the same number of aircraft as today but with value-added functions during normal operations. By having an aircraft’s flight plan, weather and other data feeds, the super dispatcher can use the workstation tools to suggest route changes to gain more favorable upper atmosphere winds or avoid turbulence, and send the suggestions directly to the aircraft in a format for direct insertion into the flight management system (FMS) upon the captain’s concurrence. 

A key element of the ground control station enabling the new functionality is the NASA-developed cockpit situation display (CSD), a multi-function screen that depicts aircraft positions, routes and hazards, including terrain, predictive weather, hazard advisory areas and traffic in 2-D or 3-D on the screen. The CSD also includes a “pulse predictor,” light pulses along the routes of nearby aircraft that show the position of each going forward in time, an indicator of potential traffic conflicts on a new route the super dispatcher might be contemplating. The pulse predictor also shows the movement of weather to determine if a reroute will remain clear of storms.

In addition to contingencies, the conops calls for a ground operator to take the first officer role during certain portions of a flight where teamwork is critical, including arrivals, departures and taxiing. Given the variety of local terrain, weather and airspace issues, NASA is also considering a “harbor pilot” ground controller who would take over from the super dispatcher at the top-of-descent point down to the gate. 

In normal operations, the super dispatcher is there to watch the operations and offer advice or help for the pilot. In a contingency, which has to be triggered by the captain, the super dispatcher transitions into dedicated support mode as a first officer in the left seat of the ground station; the pilot and first officer then conduct a briefing over an open microphone loop to assign duties, including who will fly the aircraft (the first officer flies via inputs to the autoflight system in the mode control panel representation in the ground control station). The super dispatcher can then brief the captain about information available in the ground station, including the most viable diversion choices given the environmental conditions and aircraft’s physical state. 

A new ground station capability introduced in SPO-3 is the emergency landing planner (ELP). Originally designed by the Intelligent Systems division at Ames as an emergency landing spot finder for an aircraft that had been damaged, ELP will recommend the best diversion airport given the weather and the conditions at the various candidate airports. “It’s not going to land the aircraft for the pilot,” says Johnson, “but it will optionally devise a flight plan for them and can send an FMS update.” One issue pilots in SPO‑3 noted about ELP was that the software did not indicate its logic in selecting the best alternative. Johnson says NASA is working with the Air Force Research Laboratory on a new version that will generate an explanation of its choice for the pilot or ground operator.

The NASA-developed Cockpit Situation Display provides a 3-D graphic of current and future weather, traffic and obstacles along an aircraft’s route. Credit: John Croft/AW&ST

The latest conops pedigree comes from lessons learned in the earlier SPO‑1 and SPO-2 studies. As part of SPO-1, which used only desktop simulators, NASA separated the captains and first officers with nothing but an open microphone for coordination. “We flew them through some highly challenging off-nominal scenarios—weather, wheel well fires and diversions,” says Johnson. “We saw how well two people could manage one aircraft when they weren’t sitting right next to each other. We didn’t put any technologies in to make it easier, because we wanted to see where the problems were.” 

Researchers determined that there were crew resource management (CRM) issues when the pilots were separated—for instance, there were times of momentary confusion about who was the pilot-flying. “We designed a set of CRM tools and other mitigations to try and address this,” says Johnson. Along with those CRM tools, SPO-2 featured the first-generation ground control station, with separated pilots flying more challenging scenarios.

One aid gives the captain or the ground-based first officer a dedicated display for recognizing new inputs to the aircraft’s heading, speed and altitude through a mode control panel, which either pilot can perform in a dedicated mode. When the captain inputs a speed change, for example, the equivalent field on the first officer’s display flashes the new information. In a two-pilot cockpit, the first officer would point to the information to confirm the change. In this case, the first officer uses the open microphone to confirm along with touching the field on the screen, which the captain would do as well on a dedicated display in the cockpit. “In SPO-2, they found that by putting in the checks, the frequency of verbal communications went up,” says Johnson. Researchers also found during that experiment that an aircraft in trouble required a dedicated ground operator. “They belong to the captain; they can no longer support those other aircraft,” says Johnson.

SPO-3 investigated two concepts related to the roles of the ground operator. In one scenario, the super dispatcher managing 12 aircraft transitioned into dedicated mode as first officer for a problem aircraft, passing off the others; and in the other scenario, the super dispatcher kept the 11 nominal aircraft, passing off the problem aircraft to a specialist. Input from pilots showed the two scenarios to be roughly equivalent, which surprised Johnson. “We thought that holding on to the original aircraft and handing off the rest, you would have more situational awareness and that would be better,” he says. “To the extent we found anything, we found that when they (went into dedicated mode with one aircraft), they had a hard time forgetting about the other 11, especially if there was an impending task.”

In future studies, NASA is planning to investigate some type of physiological monitoring of the captain, along with the video feed already installed for SPO-3. Ground operators found the video, showing the captain’s seat and the control panel in dedicated support mode, to be “somewhat useful” for inferring the pilot’s actions. A similar video feed on the super dispatcher position was “totally useless,” as that operator uses a mouse.

Monitoring for the captain would include alerting for non-responsiveness; however, the threshold for the ground controllers taking over the aircraft when not in dedicated mode would be necessarily high, as the captain remains in charge of the safety of the flight in the SPO conops. “Is he sleeping, is he dead, or has he gone into oxygen deprivation and he thinks he’s fine and blue birds are flying around the cockpit?” says Johnson. “The person on the ground, if he sees these monitors going off, he can hook in and say, how are you doing?” 

Canada takes key role in effort to shine light on global aircraft surveillance blind spots

Canada takes key role in effort to shine light on global aircraft surveillance blind spots

Kristine Owram, Financial Post · Dec. 22, 2014 | Last Updated: Dec. 29, 2014 8:41 AM ET

The world’s oceans are a massive blind spot when it comes to aircraft surveillance, a fact that was tragically illustrated by the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in March. But a new network of satellites that will begin launching in 2015 will offer complete global coverage for the first time — and Canada is a key player.

Today, ground-based radar is generally used to track aircraft as they fly over land. But once a plane is about 200 miles offshore, that surveillance drops off and pilots are reliant on less accurate forms of communication such as high-frequency radio or a text-based system called datalink.

Monday, tragedy struck again when an Indonesia AirAsia plane, an Airbus A320-200 disappeared after its pilot failed to get permission to fly higher to avoid bad weather during a flight from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore on Sunday. The plane was refused permission because of heavy air traffic.

The missing AirAsia jet carrying 162 people could be at the bottom of the sea after it was presumed to have crashed off the Indonesian coast, an official said on Monday, as countries around Asia sent ships and planes to help in the search.

The drop in radar surveillance offshore is why it’s so difficult to find a downed plane if it disappears over the ocean, but it also creates more quotidian problems that raise costs for airlines and extend flying time for passengers. Onshore, where radar coverage is nearly universal in Canada except in the Far North, planes can fly within five nautical miles of each other. But over the ocean, when radar surveillance drops off, that rises to 80 nautical miles for safety reasons. This means longer flying times, higher fuel costs and more emissions.

Canada’s civil air navigation service, Nav Canada, hopes to change that through a joint venture called Aireon LLC that has the potential to save the global airline industry billions of dollars.

“Probably 80% of the earth is a blind spot to surveillance right now, which forces aircraft to fly under what’s known as procedural separation standards which are very, very inefficient,” John Crichton, president and CEO of Ottawa-based Nav Canada, said in an interview.

“Our plan is to bring real-time surveillance to everyone on the planet and particularly over the oceans.”

Here’s how it will work: Aireon partner Iridium Communications Inc., a Virginia-headquartered satellite company, will launch a constellation of 72 satellites that will carry a technology known as automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast, or ADS-B. This will broadcast a plane’s location nearly instantaneously, compared to every 10 or 15 minutes under datalink.

Once launched, Aireon’s service will immediately reduce the necessary distance between aircraft from 80 nautical miles to 15 over busy routes like the North Atlantic. This will allow more aircraft to fly at the optimum altitude to take advantage of prevailing winds and, in turn, burn less fuel.

Another side benefit to passengers could be less turbulence. Currently, airlines flying across the North Atlantic are stuck in a set track — “almost like a conga line of airplanes across the ocean,” according to Aireon CEO Don Thoma, a former Iridium executive. This leaves pilots with few options if they encounter turbulence on the route, but the new Aireon system will give them more flexibility to fly above or below bumpy spots.

Mr. Thoma estimates that Aireon will save airlines an average of $400 in fuel costs per flight during the three-and-a-half hour trip across the North Atlantic.

“It’s been estimated that when the service is in operation in 2018, it will save on the order of $125 million per year on fuel just for the airlines flying across the North Atlantic,” he said.

This won’t necessarily mean the planes are travelling faster, but it will mean they’re travelling more efficiently. However, Mr. Thoma said he hopes that Aireon will eventually allow airlines to take more direct routes from, say, Madrid to Miami, saving passengers time in the process. Aireon should also help decongest the busiest routes, like London to New York, and allow for more flights at optimal times of day.

It will save on the order of $125 million per year on fuel just for the airlines flying across the North Atlantic

And it won’t just improve aircraft surveillance over the ocean. There are also wide swathes of Africa and Asia, as well as some parts of South America, that aren’t covered by radar.

“It’s a quantum leap for the parts of the world that have not deployed Stuart Gradon/Postmedia News files

Airlines are enthusiastic about the new technology, according to the industry’s global trade body.

“IATA does not endorse individual vendors, but we certainly see value in space-based ADS-B and its potential to improve both safety and security,” said Tony Concil, spokesman for the International Air Transport Association. “It is clearly an area of great interest in the industry.”

And interest has only heightened since the disappearance of MH370. One of the side benefits offered by Aireon is the ability to pinpoint the exact location of a crash — assuming, of course, that the plane’s transponder is switched on, which it was not in the case of MH370.

Aireon has agreed to make its service available free of charge to search-and-rescue authorities through a system called ALERT.

Although it wouldn’t have helped to find MH370 since the plane’s transponder was shut off, Mr. Crichton cited the example of Air France Flight 447, which crashed en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in 2009.

“It took them two years to find the airplane and God knows how much money,” Mr. Crichton said.

“We could have pinpointed where the airplane went down within a matter of seconds.”

Royal Air Maroc this weekend celebrated the arrival into Morocco of its first 787 Dreamliner

    The airline will be the first carrier in the Mediterranean region to operate the 787. The airplane, delivered to the airline on 31 December, 2014 from Boeing’s Everett, Washington Delivery Center, flew a 4,788 nautical mile (8,867 kilometre) nonstop flight to Royal Air Maroc’s home base in Casablanca at Mohammed V International Airport. 

    “The 787 will provide Royal Air Maroc the capability to grow its long haul network and significantly reduce operating costs, all while offering its customers an unmatched on-board experience,” said Van Rex Gallard, vice president of Sales, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Boeing Commercial Airplanes. “Royal Air Maroc is a valued Boeing customer, and we are delighted to be able to celebrate with the airline as it opens a new chapter in its long and successful history with the operation of the 787. We look forward to strengthening our partnership with Royal Air Maroc as it expands its global long haul fleet.” 

        Passengers traveling on Royal Air Maroc’s 787 will experience the passenger-pleasing features of the Dreamliner such as larger, electronically dimmable windows and larger overhead luggage bins. During flight the 787 is pressurised to a lower cabin altitude, has higher humidity levels, advanced air filtration and smoother-ride technology to make the flying experience more comfortable and allow passengers to arrive at their destination more refreshed. Royal Air Maroc’s current fleet includes nearly 50 Boeing airplanes, consisting predominantly of Next-Generation 737s but also 767-300s, a 747-400 and now it first 787. The Casablanca-based carrier operates a domestic network throughout Morocco and serves more than 50 destinations across Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. Boeing’s partnership with Royal Air Maroc dates back more than 40 years

Fly-SAX launches new international route to Uganda

Fly-SAX has announced the launch of its new international route to Uganda. Commercial flights between Nairobi and Entebbe, the capital of Uganda, commence tomorrow, January 9 2015.

With twice daily flights, Fly-SAX is significantly increasing the connectivity between the two countries and ensuring greater passenger choice. 

“We are launching a new route to meet the ever-increasing demand for low-cost, efficient and safe air travel between Uganda and Kenya,” said Don Smith, CEO & Founder of Fly-SAX. “Uganda forms part of our multi-hub strategy operating out of Nairobi and Mombasa, serving major cities in East Africa as well as the popular beach and safari destinations within Kenya.” 

Fly-Sax will be using a 50-seater CRJ to ferry passengers to and from Entebbe.

IATA announce decline in African traffic for November

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) announced global passenger traffic results for November 2014 showing a general continuation of the healthy demand trend of recent months apart from the African region that sees a decline.

Total revenue passenger kilometers (RPKs) rose 6.0% compared to November 2013, which was ahead of the 5.7% year-over-year growth recorded in October as well as the 10-year average growth rate of 5.6%. November capacity expanded by 5.4%, leading to a 0.5 percentage point rise in the load factor to 76.7%. 

Growth was driven primarily by domestic markets which experienced a 6.9% increase in demand over the previous November (an acceleration over the 5.3% year-to-date average for domestic travel). Chinese domestic travel (which rose 15.4% over the previous November) was the main contributor to this growth. International travel, meanwhile, experienced a slight deceleration in growth towards the end of the year. 

FTK: Freight-Tonne-Kilometers; AFTK: Available Freight Tonne Kilometers; FLF: Freight Load Factor. All Figures are expressed in % change Year on Year except FLF which are the load factors for the specific month. 

“November demand was healthy, but the overall picture is mixed. For example, strong traffic performance within China and India has not carried over into international demand for Asia-Pacific carriers. And while lower oil prices should be positive for economic activity, softening business confidence is having a dampening effect on international travel,” said Tony Tyler, IATA’s Director General and CEO.

International Passenger Markets 

November 2014 international passenger demand was up 5.4% compared to the year-ago period, which was below the 6.1% year-to-date growth trend. Capacity rose 5.9% and the load factor dipped 0.3 percentage points to 75.1%. All regions except Africa recorded year-over-year increases in demand. However, compared to October, most regions reported slower demand growth for November. 

·      African carriers were the only ones to see a decline in demand: November traffic fell 2.5% compared to the same month in 2013. Capacity fell 3.1%, causing load factor to rise 0.4 percentage points to 63.8%, the lowest for any region. Passenger volumes for the region’s carriers are back at late 2012 levels. The recent weakness appears to reflect adverse economic developments in parts of the continent including Nigeria, which is highly reliant on oil revenues. The impact on traffic owing to the Ebola outbreak is largely restricted to Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone (markets that comprise a very small proportion of overall African traffic). 

·      European carriers’ demand for international services rose 5.6% in November 2014 compared to the year-ago period in spite of the region’s economic frailties and risks. Robust travel on low cost carriers is behind much of the growth. Capacity climbed 4.9% leading to a 0.5 percentage point rise in the load factor to 77.7%. 

·      Asia-Pacific airlines recorded a 4.9% demand increase compared to November 2013 amid signs of a slowdown in regional production activity. Trade volumes have remained strong, however. With capacity up 5.6%, the load factor slipped 0.5 percentage points to 74.6%. 

·      North American airlines saw demand rise 2.0% over the 2013 period. This was an improvement over growth of 1.6% in October. November capacity rose 3.1%, causing load factor to fall 0.8 percentage points to 76.8%. The US economy is a notable bright-spot among developed economies, and recent gains in trade volumes bode well for business-related travel. 

·      Middle East carriers had the strongest traffic growth at 11.7%. This was the fourth consecutive month of double-digit year-over-year growth and the region’s economies are comparatively well-placed to withstand plunging oil revenues. Capacity rose 13.9% and load factor fell 1.4 percentage points to 70.1%. 

·      Latin American airlines experienced a 4.9% rise in demand in November. Capacity increased 5.7% and load factor fell 0.6 percentage points to 78.8%. Despite the decline, the load factor was the highest for any region. Although major economies in the region have been weak, the strength of the US economy has supported traffic carried by the region's airlines. 

Demand for domestic travel rose 6.9% in November 2014 compared to the year-ago period, an acceleration of the October increase of 5.9%. Total domestic capacity was up 4.5% and load factor climbed 1.7 percentage points to 79.3%. 

·      China’s domestic traffic soared 15.4% compared to November 2013, the strongest performance for any market. In fact, two-thirds of the total increase in domestic RPKs over the last few months is attributable to gains in the Chinese domestic market. This is occurring in spite of ongoing signs of a slowdown in the Chinese economy and industrial activity, although consumer surveys and retail sales data remain robust. 

·      Australia’s domestic demand was virtually flat year-over year and traffic volumes have largely remained stagnant since mid-2013. The economy is struggling to rebalance away from mining investment-led growth.  

The Bottom Line: 

Aviation is a vital driver of the global economy. Last month IATA issued an updated outlook forecasting industry earnings of $25 billion in 2015. While this appears large, at the global level, on revenues of $783 billion, a $25 billion profit represents a margin of just 3.2% or around $7 per passenger. And it is spread over a highly-fragmented and hyper-competitive industry with many hundreds of players, some of whom are making sustainable returns and many of whom are struggling. 

“Nonetheless, the industry is investing to improve the passenger experience. This year we expect to see some implementation of the New Distribution Capability, giving travelers the ability to view and purchase all of an airline’s products and services wherever they shop for air travel. And more passengers will have access to Fast Travel options such as self-boarding and self-tagging of luggage that offer convenience and time-savings and give them greater control over their journey,” said Tyler.