Xeon to Power the Single European Sky 

Nearly 30 years ago, Aena, the Spanish Airports and Air Navigation authority, developed SACTA – a project devised to automate and harmonize air traffic control in the Spanish territory. With the system currently managing air traffic control for more than 1.5 million flights a year in Europe, Aena says they aiming larger - to create a system that manages a single European sky.

Currently, SACTA is in its third implementation, having grown over the last three decades into a highly sophisticated system. Working with air traffic systems company, Indra (a company which has developed a third of the world’s air traffic control systems), Aena says they are working on the next implementation of the SACTA system, SACTA 4. Aena expects SACTA 4 to become the foundation of SESAR (Single European Sky ATM Research) the single European sky initiative.

Presently, the new in-progress SACTA 4 system will seek to integrate all Spanish route and proximity control center systems with the goal of having them work in a simple, coherent manner. Aena says that it’s seeking to homogenize control systems across the country, aiming to maximize air traffic control capacity in accordance with safety. In this process, the organization hopes to deliver benefits in route calculation and air traffic flow management, while lowering control complexity and reducing delays.

With larger goals in mind, Aena needs SACTA 4 to be built with scale-out capabilities so they can push the edges of the system throughout Europe. Through collaboration with IBM, HP, and Intel, Aena says they’ve begun by installing 1,000 Intel Xeon E5 and E7 processors in 280 servers, and 2,000 processors in 500 workstations across the SACTA 4 system. The group cites the flexibility of the Xeon chips, but also notes that cost and energy reductions at airport facilities is also a consideration given the options around virtualization.

“The SACTA system is scalable, and over the years we have been developing it to meet service needs,” said Jose Luis Rodriguez Castro, Head of the Automation division at Aena. “The leap to x86 technology should enable us with increased features to improve all the functionalities we are going to need for the future.”

Those needs are considerable. Today, an aircraft that takes off in Lithuania and is destined for the Canary Islands can cross over thirteen different airspaces controlled by a host of different nations and technologies before safely reaching its destination. Under the SESAR project, they expect to unify this infrastructure, maximizing operational efficiencies while maintaining safety.

There is still a lot of air to cover. According to the European Commission for Transport and Safety, the goal is to have the SESAR project implemented by 2020.