Categoria: Europe

Sigonella is a military base located in Sicily, jointly used by the Italian and US Air Force. The base is about to undergo a modernisation process that includes the complete restructuring of the APP (Approach) facilities. SITTI is here upgrading the voice management infrastructure.

SITTI will provide the Sigonella base with a Voice Communication System (VCS) belonging the standard-compliant MULTIFONO® M800IP® family and an integrated Voice Recording & Replay System (VRS). This latter allows recording of the audio of all channels available to the controllers (and related signalling) plus their radar screens in a synchronised manner.

Meantime the APP building is restructured, APP and main radar services will be provided by a sheltered temporary facility connected to the global IP network, where controllers have access to all communication features needed for accomplishing their tasks. New controller working positions (CWP) are also part of the supply.

SITTI systems are well suited for civil as well as military usage, wherever safe, efficient, reliable communication is required, thus confirming SITTI as a one-stop supplier for Air Traffic Control needs.

The convergence of voice and data into one multimedia network is nowadays a consolidated reality, based on IP networks and related technology that fulfil all operational and technical ATM communication requirements. Analogue connections are therefore on their way to be phased out by ANSPs and replaced by VoIP (Voice over IP) links.

The work commissioned by ENAV for the ACC in Padua follows this general worldwide trend. Existing analogue MFC connections that have been successfully used for decades to interconnect remote centres are now to be upgraded to standard VoIP links using the renowned ED137 standard developed by EUROCAE. This standard is being deployed all over the globe, wherever standard ATM/ATC voice communication is concerned, although its importance is extending to other application fields as well, for safe, secure, standard, reliable voice communications.

The VCS (Voice Communication System) by SITTI installed at Padua ACC has therefore been upgraded by removing the old fashioned MFC analogue interface boards with new standard-compliant VoIP boards ensuring technologically advanced connections to Vienna (AustroControl) in redundant configuration.

The new standard VoIP connection between Padua and Vienna has been thoroughly tested according to the provisions of the ED137 standard. All tests passed positively, thus proving the conformance of ENAV systems to the top-edge achievements in the ATM/ATC field, confirming ENAV as one of the most technologically advanced ANSPs in the world.

The cooperation between civil and military air traffic controllers is of fundamental importance for ensuring safe and coordinated management of flights. The Italian ACCs (Area Control Centres) therefore also include controller positions that are run by military staff, thus having the strictly interact with operators dealing with civil aircraft.

ENAV, the Italian civil ANSP, have planned to move the management of airspace sectors from Brindisi to Rome-Ciampino as part of their industrial investment plan. This implies the need to also move the control of military sectors accordingly and to guarantee, without interruption and without jeopardizing the current capacity in terms of movements per hour, the provision of Air Traffic Control services.

SITTI has been therefore asked to develop a transition plan that will allow the mentioned move of the responsibility of airspace sector BRN (North Brindisi Area) from Brindisi to Ciampino, without compromising the current SCC/AM (Servizi Coordinamento e Controllo / Aeronautica Militare) capacity of both sites.

The plan envisages the extension of the voice handling facilities of the MULTIFONO® M800IP® VCS (SITTI Voice Communication System) in Ciampino to cope with the radio and telephone connections originally attested in Brindisi. New Controller Working Positions are also added to the Ciampino site for the proper management of the sectors over Southern Italy.

The transition of the remaining sector BRS (South Brindisi Area) is planned for the beginning of 2026.

Once these have been activated, both sites will be capable of controlling the airspace in parallel for a limited period of time, until the Brindisi facility will be shut down.

SITTI has successfully equipped the Fire Brigade with a cutting-edge communication system for their new operational centre in Naples, further demonstrating its versatility and dedication to excellence. This advanced system, part of SITTI’s comprehensive product portfolio, ensures dependable and efficient management of emergency situations, thereby strengthening the long-standing partnership between SITTI and the Fire Brigade, which has adopted SITTI solutions throughout the national territory over the years.

The new Operations Centre was inaugurated on November 28, 2024, in a ceremony attended by key stakeholders and authorities. This achievement underlines SITTI’s key role in providing high-performance communication systems for any strategic services requiring secure and solid controlled communication.

The system provided by SITTI is the state-of-the-art M800IP® Voice Communication System (VCS), which includes a redundant COTS server solution and complementary devices, such as the GPS master clock, webcams, video call facilities, and other auxiliary services.

The operational room for the Fire Brigade’s general direction in Naples represents a significant advancement in the modernization of the service and sets the stage for future installations aimed at enhancing support for citizens in emergency situations.

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** VERSIONE ITALIANA **

SITTI ha fornito con successo ai Vigili del Fuoco un avanzato sistema di comunicazione per il loro nuovo centro operativo a Napoli, ancora una volta dimostrando la versatilità dei propri prodotti. Questo sistema tecnologicamente all’avanguadia è parte dell’ampio portafoglio prodotti SITTI e garantisce una gestione affidabile ed efficiente delle situazioni di emergenza, rafforzando così la partnership di lunga data tra SITTI e i Vigili del Fuoco, che negli anni hanno adottato soluzioni SITTI su tutto il territorio nazionale.

Il nuovo Centro Operativo è stato inaugurato il 28 novembre 2024, con una cerimonia alla quale hanno partecipato anche molte autorità. Questo risultato sottolinea il ruolo chiave di SITTI nel fornire sistemi di comunicazione ad alte prestazioni per tutti i servizi strategici che richiedono comunicazioni sicure, affidabili e controllate.

Il sistema fornito da SITTI è il sistema di comunicazione vocale (VCS) M800IP® basato su una soluzione server COTS ridondante e dotato di apparati supplementari, come un orologio connesso al sistema satellitare GPS, webcam, servizi di videochiamata, eccetera.

La sala operativa della Direzione Generale dei Vigili del Fuoco di Napoli rappresenta un significativo avanzamento nel percorso di ammodernamento del servizio e pone le basi per futuri allestimenti volti a potenziare il supporto ai cittadini in situazioni di emergenza.

At the beginning of October, SITTI hosted the Greek commission that had the task of preparing and carrying out the FAT (Factory Acceptance Test) of the ordered systems. The commission had the opportunity of having “hands on” one of the VCS systems (Voice Communication System) that will be installed in Greece in the frame of a large project covering many sites. Recorders have been included as well.

The Acceptance Test Procedures (ATP) have been approved, thus permitting the prosecution of the activities envisaged in the contract between SITTI and HASP (the Hellenic Aviation Service Provider).

“We have been very committed to the good outcome of the visit by HASP.” – Mr. Panzeri, SITTI Program Manager, said – “Its positive completion once more testifies the robustness, flexibility, reliability of our systems that will give the customer top-edge functionality for a safer flight management over Greece.”

It is a big honour for us to announce that SESAR approved the ANTICIPATE project to be eligible for being granted as an interesting Exploratory Research project (ER) under Grant Agreement 101166947. Six partners will be developing the project under the chairmanship of Miquel Àngel Piera Eroles:

1. Autonomous University of Barcelona (coordinator) – Spain
2. SITTI – Italy
3. Centro Italiano Ricerche Aerospaziali (CIRA) – Italy
4. Institute For Sustainable Society And Innovation (ISSN) – Italy
5. Technische Universität Braunschweig (TUBS) – Germany
6. Eurocontrol – Belgium

This is the first time SITTI is a prime actor in SESAR projects: till now the contribution of our company to SESAR projects has been through other companies like ENAV. About one year ago, SITTI was the coordinator of another proposed project, named COVER, which has been positively evaluated but not funded by SESAR due to budget limitations.

The basic idea behind ANTICIPATE (acronym for Absorb Nearby Tidy Identified Candidates for Ideal Parteking Available Extra-Capacity) is the identification of a set of aircrafts that can be delegated to an adjacent sector to balance the workload of controllers and better exploit the capacity of each sector, by transferring the competence of a given number of aircrafts from an overloaded sector to a less engaged one.

This shall be accomplished by also taking into consideration the trajectories of the aircrafts and other possible traffic limitations, while maintaining the minimum separation between aircrafts. This project differs from possibly correlated concepts such as Dynamic Airspace Configuration (DAC) and Dynamic Airspace Sectorization (DAS) because the airspace is not “deformed” nor “reconfigured”, but the intended result is obtained by transferring a properly identified group of aircrafts from a controller to another, with temporary modification of the airspace structure.

From August 20 to 25, SITTI will be exposing at the Rimini Meeting, the annual event organized by the Communion and Liberation movement. This is the 45^th edition of this important event, whose importance in the cultural, political, religious and social fields is continuously growing: more than 700.000 persons are expected to visit the meeting this year.

The title chosen for the current edition raises a great challenge for us: ‘If we are not looking for the essential then, what are we looking for?’. The meeting in Rimini (https://www.meetingrimini.org/) is intended to show that all human aspects are strictly interconnected: society, economics, religion, work, finance all involve us as a whole and we have to think and follow what is really important to us, the essential.

ENAV and SITTI together showed how they contribute to the activities ruled by the Ministry for infrastructure and transport (MIT), by allowing visitors of all ages and all kind of backgrounds to understand how Air Traffic Control (ATC) works and is organized. Most visitors are not aware of what happens “behind the scenes” when they get on a plane and they get surprised when they start understanding how much technology is involved to guarantee they reach their destination safely and timely.

The ENAV-SITTI joint stand has been visited by the Ministry for infrastructure and transport, Mr. Matteo Salvini, who congratulated for the constant attention to passengers and the advanced technological achievements and future projects that are being implemented by the two companies.

SITTI is grateful for the opportunity it is having to reach the general public through the Meeting in Rimini, allowing visitors to appreciate the topmost level of technology applied to Air Traffic Control, developed by a fully Italian company.

Remote Towers are getting more and more popular in the ATC world, allowing the remote execution of all tasks usually performed by air traffic controllers operating from a tower located at the airport site. Today’s technology is in fact capable of making all required information available at a different site, where controllers access the same features that would be accessible in a conventional airport tower.

This makes a big difference because controllers are not asked to be physically on site, but they can work remotely in a so-called Remote Tower Control Centre (RTCC) from which a number of airports can be managed simultaneously from one location. Of course, this implies the capability of the involved systems to remote all their interfaces, to give operators the feeling of being physically sitting in the airport tower, even if they are hundreds of kilometres afar. Video streams caught by cameras of different kinds are displayed to provide an out-of-window view of the airport. Radio and telephone voice communication means is also made available remotely.

ENAV, the Italian ANSP, is in the process of building up a RTCC in Brindisi to gradually move the management of small to medium airports to this centralized facility. For the accomplishment of this task, SITTI has been asked to cooperate with the provision of a new MULTIFONO® M800IP® system to be used as the main VCS. These systems will be integrated with a data and voice recording and replay system (named VRS800S), also capable of recording ambient audio.

The new M800IP® Voice Communication System (VCS) will be equipped with a total of 48 new controller working positions (CWP), capable of seamlessly access analogue, digital and VoIP (Voice over IP) radio and telephone links through high level, top performing, touch screen panels. The emergency VCS will be complemented by another 15 CWPs and additional telephone and radio channels. All what above is accompanied by the VRS800S Voice Recording System, capable of simultaneously record more than 100 VoIP channels and 120 E1 channels, plus ambient audio.

ENAV and SITTI are together building up a modern remote control centre that will allow the Italian ANSP reducing operative costs, without renouncing to its high level standards of high reliability and safety to the benefit of all airlines and passengers.

The Italian Air Force (AM – Aeronautica Militare) has recently awarded SITTI the implementation of a geographical network connecting its main sites by use of the VoIP (Voice over IP) technology. The same network will be also used as the backbone for the Remote Instant Messaging service between operators located at different sites.

SITTI boasts a very solid and long-lasting strict relationship with AM that brought along the past decades at the installation of several VCS (Voice Communication Systems) in the airbases all over Italy. These systems are now going to be upgraded to be part of a large nation-wide standard network.

Dedicated so-called SCC/AM (Servizi Coordinamento e Controllo) centres are operating 24/7 to allow efficient and effective coordination between civil and military flights and to provide the air traffic control service in the military dedicated airspace. All these centres will now be connected to a nation-wide network, allowing direct connection on one side to the military control centres and on the other side to all military airfield towers.

The contract between the Air Force and SITTI envisages the installation or upgrade of MULTIFONO® M800IP® systems developed by SITTI, to allow VoIP communications in full adherence and compliance to the world renowned standard ED137. The new network architecture is not only allowing more efficient links between operators, but also dramatically reduces the amount of network resources needed: dedicated links are no longer needed as the bandwidth is only occupied while conversations are in place, thus giving the overall network a much greater throughput.

All what above is accomplished by server-based VCS systems of the M800IP® family, connected to the network via duplicated independent interfaces for reliability purposes and security reasons, thus fully isolating the local VCSs from the outer world, preventing possible unauthorized access.

“The implementation of such an important and large-scope project once more testifies the capability of SITTI to tackle challenging scenarios.” – Mr. Massimo Romata, SITTI Program Manager, stated – “This also applies to those clients for which security is of utmost importance, as for military purposes.”

Always very attentive to the evolutions in the field of voice handling, SITTI is actively participating in the EUROCAE WG122 working group devoted to the definition of virtual centres and all their implications on the services needed for an efficient, safe, effective management of the air traffic.

On May 21, ENAV hosted a WG122 meeting at their nice facilities in Rome Ciampino, during which several important aspects on virtual centres have been discussed. Many experts from different companies representing both ANSPs (Air Navigation Service Providers) and industry met to commence work on a new document “Virtual Centre – Guidelines for Implementation”.

SITTI was represented by its Innovation Manager, Roberto Weger, who described the framework of the contingency and delegation use cases related to the initial deployment of the virtual centre concept within ENAV.