Cleared for a very late take-off

Waiting on the Tarmac...

		By Jonathan Duffy BBC News Online

British transport has become synonymous with delay. But six years must be some kind of a record. Yet that's been the hold-up on the new air traffic control centre, which opens on Sunday.

In the small hours of Sunday morning a handful of aircraft flying over southern England will earn a place in British aviation history.

At some point between midnight and 3am the long-awaited air traffic control centre in Swanwick, Hampshire, is due to take charge of the skies. Passengers in the air at the time will pass into the care of the world's most advanced air traffic control centre.

Britain's skies are becoming increasingly crowded

That is, if all goes to plan.

Being six years overdue has earned Swanwick a level of notoriety second only to the British Library in terms of delayed government projects.

Plans for Swanwick were originally laid in early 1990, in response to the seemingly inexorable growth in holiday and business flights.

For years, the handling of air traffic over England and Wales had been split between two control centres, run by the National Air Traffic Services (Nats) in West Drayton in Middlesex, and Manchester.

Their job has been to deal with en-route traffic - the flights that criss-cross British airspace - as well as the planes that take-off and land at England's big airports.

Double trouble

But with air traffic doubling about every 15 years, and the number of in-flight near misses increasing, it was clear the existing arrangements for marshalling Britain's skies would soon be unable to cope.

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The decision was taken to start from scratch. The two existing operations would be brought under one roof to form the biggest purpose-built air traffic control centre in the world. IBM was chosen to develop a bespoke computer system for it.

Although the package would be based on one that was already being developed for the United States, it meant designing new hardware and writing wholly original software.

With hindsight, says independent air traffic control expert Philip Butterworth-Hayes, this was probably the wrong tack.

"The basic stumbling block was not to get off-the-shelf components and software. When you plan a new operation like this, you want it to be good for the next 20 to 25 years.

New demands

"But software is advancing at a tremendous pace, so it becomes obsolete every 18 months."

Chaos at Heathrow after a 20-minute ATC computer blackout

Demands have also changed in response to advances in surveillance technology, communications and the amount of data pilots can access from the cockpit.

But further problems were in the pipeline, and the promise that Swanwick would come on line in 1996 looked increasingly hard to keep.

In 1994 IBM sold the project on to another company, Loral. A year later, the Americans scrapped their Advanced Automation System that had been a template for the British design.

In 1996 it emerged there were stability problems with the newly written software. Meanwhile, the project was effectively placed in yet another set of hands as Loral was bought by Lockheed Martin.

Red faces all round

"That inevitably caused disruption," says Mr Butterworth-Hayes, author of Jane's Air Traffic Control Special Report.

"When a company gets taken over there are shake ups and new strategies. Lockheed Martin is an aeronautics company, so it would have had its own idea of how to do things."

Nicely landscaped: The new Swanwick centre

Developments at Swanwick were becoming an embarrassment to the government, which last year part-privatised Nats, but an independent report in 1998 rejected scrapping the project.

As the delay wore on, tensions developed between the competing pressures of safety and a ticking clock, says Iain Findlay, of the air traffic controllers union Prospect.

"There were various caustic comments from government ministers but, to give them their due, the managers were not prepared to risk anything," says Mr Findlay.

"As an ATC you take hundreds of lives in your hands at one time. Making sure the system was safe was always paramount."

Worthwhile?

There have been many more hitches along the line. More than a year was spent clearing 1,400 bugs from the new software and taking staff off frontline duty for training on the new system threatened delays in many a departure lounge.

And at a total cost of £623m (some estimates put the figure as high as £700m), Swanwick is double its original budget.

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So was it worth it?

Probably not, says Mr Butterworth-Hayes. The new operation will undoubtedly ease things up, allowing safer and more efficient handling of flights, and therefore fewer near misses.

And it will have tonnes of spare capacity to cope with the relentless rise in air traffic.

But France has handled the same challenge more effectively, he says.

"From day one the French realised software was the problem. They've gone for off-the-shelf software that will be updated every year. It's been introduced with fewer delays.

"There are four major air traffic improvement programmes in Europe at the moment: France, Britain, Italy and Germany. Who has been the most successful? You have to say the UK is not in the top three."

All change: Inside West Drayton (left) and Swanwick