The new AMHS and AIS solution for the air navigation service provider of Pakistan, PCAA, was officially inaugurated in Karachi in August. The ICAO headquarter actively supported PCAA in the execution of the project and their skilled air traffic management experts monitored the implementation ensuring that all steps were executed in accordance with ICAO’s stringent functional and quality standards.
The AMHS part of the system makes PCAA a pioneer in the Asia-Pacific region using the advantages of this communication standard nationwide from the very beginning. Existing AFTN communications with PCAA’s neighbouring international partners India, Kuwait, China, Iran and Afghanistan are presently bridged via an AFTN/AMHS gateway. However, Pakistan intends to transfer international services to AMHS in the near future and first international AMHS tests are already envisaged with the Indian AMHS.
As a key advantage, the user terminals fully integrate aeronautical messaging with flight planning, OPMET and NOTAM databases and therefore allow users to straightforwardly create perfectly fitted pre-flight briefings directly from the flight plan filed into the system. As a result of the outstanding cooperation between the German supplier and the local administration, PCAA already entertains the idea of extending their current solution with further COMSOFT components, such as the corresponding AIXM 5 database extension for static aeronautical data and digital NOTAMs.
At present, the Pakistani network is arranged around COMSOFT’s market-leading messaging solution AIDA-NG and 40 complementary CADAS user terminals for comfortable and assisted entering of various kinds of aeronautical data. The number of national data clients is steadily increasing as installations can easily be carried out by the customer’s intensely trained technical staff.