NAV Portugal's mission
NAV Portugal is the Portuguese air navigation services provider to both Portuguese FIRs: Lisboa and Santa Maria. NAV Portugal’s mission is to plan, guide and to control the air traffic in accordance with the international and national regulation, applying the highest standards of safety, optimising capacities, and enhancing efficiency, always taking in account environmental concerns.
The Transition and Migration Plan of AIS products towards EAD (European AIS Database), concerning NOTAM production, Static Database (Static Data Operation), Published AIP Management System (PAMS) and AIP Production was concluded in July 2003. For several reasons, it was impossible to include in the same package, the migration of AIP Charts towards EAD, as initially planned, adding some consequences to the quality of the service provision.
A truly integrated workflow
In 2006, NAV Portugal finally had the optimum environment to integrate the charts into the AIS department, making it their main objective to have all the tools for an efficient and integrated AIS operation: Static Data Management, International NOTAM Operations, AIP and Chart production, and Pre-Flight Information Briefing. To achieve this goal, one important consideration was the fact that EAD offers a truly integrated workflow as all systems use the same data source.
We now have a robust Charting tool which uses the static data from the EAD SDO. This way it can always be assured that all charts and the AIP textual parts use the same data. The software is very efficient and allows us to produce chart products more quickly with improved quality.
Luis Santos
Chart team coordinator - AIS department NAV Portugal
Professional chart production platform
''The EAD Chart Production system based on the smartGlobe Aeronautical Charting System provides NAV Portugal with a professional and modern chart production platform that is fully integrated with the EAD Static Data Operation,'' says Luis Santos, Chart Team Coordinator (AIS/MAP) in the Aeronautical Information Services (AIS) Department, NAV Portugal.
''The ECIT Chart Production is designed to be a productivity tool: rather than having to deal with data entry, data preparation and configuration, our charting officers can concentrate on the creation of the charts themselves,'' says Luis. “Many tasks have been automated, such as grid/graticule creation, retrieval of static data, symbolisation and annotation. Clean-up tasks are supported by specialised tool boxes. Once a chart has been created, it can be automatically updated by applying another effective date to the chart.''
An open system
Another advantage for NAV Portugal was that the EAD Chart Production system is an open system, allowing for the import and export of most common bitmap and vector data formats, which meant that their existing charts could be easily migrated to the EAD Chart Production system.
''If SDO data isn’t available for procedures, we can use the integrated Calculation tools in smartGlobe to calculate accurate intersections, tracks and distances. In this way we can interactively build our procedures knowing that they can be replaced with the SDO procedures once available.''
Additionally, the EAD Chart Production system comes with an ICAO Annex 4 compliant Symbol library and pre-defined chart specifications. It is also possible to define your own (non-ICAO) chart specifications if required.
