Categoria: Europe

Many different emergency situations may occur at airports. Most of them involve aircrafts having problems in landing, taxiing, maneuvering, taking off require the intervention of specialized and qualified teams to tackle the issue and solve it, trying to minimize the overall effects of the abnormal situation, with special attention to human lives. This is the main task of the firefighting staff operating at the airports.

They are constantly monitoring all radio frequencies used for airport services, including ground and air traffic control, to be able to immediately react in case of any real or potential risk. Besides them, other radio frequencies are listened to, to receive indications and orders from the area and regional firefighters commands. Telephone connections to all other emergency services inside and outside the airport are used to coordinate possible interventions.

Since end of last December, 2022, SITTI completed the setup of a new MULTIFONO® M800IP® system at the Malpensa firefighters tower, thus allowing operators to benefit of all the modern features provided by this new VOIP-based system. In particular, radio and telephone connections of different kinds (e.g. both analogue and VOIP) are seamlessly integrated to give operative staff immediate, efficient, quick access to all communication features.

The installation and setup of the new system has been carried out by SITTI specialised personnel, that has been coordinated by SEA, the airport managing company, and supported by the local firefighter station, to guarantee a smooth transition from the previous system based on TDM technology to the new VOIP one.

The extremely good relationship between firefighting brigades all over the National territory and SITTI, permits this vital emergency service to take full advantage of the constant research and development activities carried out by SITTI and to get full support in case of any possible issue or expansion request that can arise from the field.

AIRSPACE WORLD is the world’s largest international Air Traffic Control and Air Traffic Management (ATC/ATM) exhibition, taking place in Geneva from 8th to 10th March. This unique venue is attracting industry market leaders and Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) from all around the globe. Product developers, experts and end users gather for three days to share the latest products and achievements.

The participation at AIRSPACE WORLD is the natural prosecution of the continuous presence of SITTI at the major exhibitions on ATC/ATM that have taken place in the past. Last year a similar event (called World ATM Congress) too place in Madrid in the second half of June.

This is the right place where Air Traffic Control stakeholders meet and make things happen. It is a very important event, where SITTI has the opportunity to show its latest developments in this field and to meet the interest of many customers, both those that are new to us and those who have been knowing us since long.

Following its vocation and commitment to present its Innovative Products to the international audience, SITTI will be participating in this first edition of the Airspace World exhibition (https://airspaceworld.com). New ideas and product concepts will be shown, with special and particular attention to Integrated Solutions, combining data and voice.

Voice Communication Systems (VCS), VoIP gateways, recorders, integrated information solutions, consoles are the main products developed by SITTI to provide customers with a comprehensive solution to their needs.

Come and visit us at booth G17.

On November 11, 2022, ENAV (the Italian ANSP) (Air Navigation Service Provider) organized an Open Day for celebrating the conclusion of the campaign aimed at validating the Virtual Centre Architectures in the frame of SESAR 2020 W2.

The execution of the various exercises validated the concept of “Delegation of ATM services provision among ATSUs”, together with contingency use cases. For the purpose of the campaign, one ADSP (ATM Data Service Provider) and two ATSUs (ATM Service Units) were involved in a simulated environment, focusing on the coordination between Rome and Brindisi ACCs (Area Control Centres), also including Civil-Military operations.

The exercises were carried out at ENAV National Test Facility in Rome using COFLIGHT Cloud Services (CCS), LEONARDO radar stations and SITTI Voice Communication System (VCS) touchscreens, taking into due consideration the specific requirements to support the service interfaces with the Virtual Centre architectures defined by EUROCAE Working Group 122.

SITTI actively contributed to the success of the planned exercises through a simulated VCS environment. The VCS facility make it possible to ATCOs (air traffic control operators) working at the (simulated) site of Brindisi to interact with their colleagues in Rome and some (simulated) pilots to run all foreseen tests and positively terminate the validation campaign. The following operational use cases have been addressed from an operational perspective at different traffic load conditions:

• Delegation of ATM services provision at night
• Delegation of ATM services provision at fixed time
• Delegation of ATM services provision on-demand
• Delegation of ATM services provision between Civil and Military ATSUs

The SITTI system showed its native flexibility, by allowing the definition of many different independent operational scenarios, through which all communication aspects involved in the delegation process could be successfully assessed.

On November 9, 2022, at 6:20 am, an earthquake hit the Adriatic coast, near the cities of Pesaro and Ancona, Central Italy. The earthquake magnitude was not devastating, however it understandably created apprehension in the population that felt its tremors and was scared of possible serious consequences that, thanks God, did not occur.

On that day, the local fire brigades received about 1000 calls asking for help and requests of site inspections for making sure infrastructures and buildings and houses were safe to use, work or live in. The Pesaro operative room is equipped with SITTI MULTIFONO® M800IP® voice communication system (VCS) with 3 VoIP (voice over IP) operator working positions that were able to cope with all incoming calls and properly dispatch orders to the fire brigades patrols on the territory.

The VCS system has been under stress for many hours, representing the focal point for the communications between the operative command and the firefighters operating in the area. The reliability and continuous availability of the system, its capability of queuing calls and properly connecting operators, allowed it to provide an excellent service, so that all emergency calls have been duly managed and processed, even during the following days when more than 2000 further calls have been received for the same reasons.

The operative and control room in Ancona thanked SITTI for the unparalleled good quality of the system they have been using. His words are the best advertisement for our products. “This further encourages us to enhance and improve our products” – Mr. Federico Di Guida, head of SITTI maintenance department said – “to continue providing our customer with top-edge systems and services.”

Following a safety requirement from the Italian aviation regulator (ENAC), the national Air Navigation Service Provider (ENAV) asked SITTI to implement a radio override feature between the Malpensa airport and the Linate ACC.

The safety requirement applies to airports with two parallel runways. It states that parallel operations can be carried out, provided a higher level management entity (the ACC) is possibly capable (e.g. in case of emergency) of taking control of the radios used at the airport.

The implementation of this feature was greatly facilitated by the native flexibility and integrated solution provided by the MULTIFONO® Voice Communication Systems (VCS) by SITTI.

The technical, system, functional maintenance contract between the Italian military air force (Aeronautica Militare) and SITTI has been renewed. The renewal will be covering the next three years, thus guaranteeing the customer a complete assistance service covering a long observation time, with operative continuity with the current ongoing similar service.

The maintenance activities included in the contract will be covering all 58 air bases and defence centres scattered over the Italian peninsula for the management of the military air traffic, with more than 120 systems installed.

SITTI VCS systems have been running for many years, thus proving their outstanding reliability that made unit replacement and fault repair activities quite infrequent. The maintenance and assistance contract that has been signed between AM and SITTI is intended to provide the customer with technical, functional and system assistance to cope with any possible degradation or disruption.

The maintenance contract envisages the continuous possibility of accessing phone assistance during working hours 5 days a week, with constant 24/7 availability on call in case of any urgency. Should anything serious occur that cannot be solved over the phone, a qualified engineer is guaranteed to be on site within 48 hours.

Programmed maintenance activities are scheduled to be executed daily, weekly or monthly, according to the system parts to be supervised. This allows to preventively recognize possible degradations and also issue early warnings for the replacement of any unit or the identification of throughput bottlenecks.

“The Italian air force is a demanding customer. Their task is to provide Italy with an efficient and reliable air defence system” – Mr. Di Guida, SITTI Technical Assistance Manager, stated – “that needs an effective, quick and always accessible support from the industry. The renewal of this contract once more testifies the capability of SITTI to provide such an important support service.”

LNVL, the Dutch Air Navigation Service Provider (ANSP), ordered SITTI the design, delivery, installation, and bringing into service of three Last Resort Radio Telephony Systems (LRRTS) to be located at Schiphol-East, Schiphol-Centre and Rotterdam The Hague. This project has been extended to supply an additional LRRTS system for the new POLARIS ACC/APP room, including a simulator for training purposes.

The scope of supply consists of the delivery and installation of Aeronautical Air/Ground Radio Equipment, including all necessary and ancillary hardware and software, not forgetting Monitoring and Control functions for all locations. Control workstations are connected to the national supervision system.

The initial project required SITTI to develop a new type of Controller Working Position, in accordance with the specifications of the system, by taking into consideration the special characteristics set by the customer. The new Polaris LRRTS system will be equipped with 60 of such positions, each capable of being configured for selectively accessing up to 20 radios connected to the system, today via analogue links. Additional 20 positions are envisaged for the simulation system.

The Voice Communication Systems (VCSs) used for this project belong to SITTI MULTIFONO® M800IP® and prove their flexibility in being capable of managing a large number of specially designed Controller Working Positions (CWPs) and analogue radio links. These same systems are natively ready to be seamlessly expanded to include standard ED-137 VOIP radios and recorders.

The extremely high flexibility, resilience, fault-tolerability of SITTI systems, with no single point of failure (SPOF) and 99.9999% availability, make M800IP® the best choice for coping with mission-critical and last-resort needs all over the world.

Since many years, the Italian fire brigades have been covering their communication and dispatching needs by means of Voice Communication Systems provided by SITTI. The native capability of these systems to cope and correctly manage voice and data flows according to the latest international standards make SYNCRONIS® MULTIFONO® Voice Communication Systems (VCS) the best choice when it comes to the management of reliable, secure and controlled communications.

The Italian firefighting public emergency service is based on geographically distributed command centres (Comandi Provinciali), each covering a significantly wide area. These centres are equipped with an enhanced VCS (called UCG) from which trained personnel take all necessary decisions for the proper intervention in all cases where firefighters are involved and/or forward the call to other public services, like police and healthcare.

The maintenance of the 78 sites where SITTI UCG systems are installed has been awarded to a third company that is dealing with all logistics and intervention issues. In case of need, engineers from this company have the possibility of accessing a qualified helpdesk provided by SITTI, capable of providing all technical information for the proper handling of any issue that can in any way diminish the reliability of the overall system and the proper and quick solving of any upcoming problem.