Melbourne Airport will get a new $17 million air traffic control tower and the latest navigation systems to make take-offs and landings less perilous in marginal conditions.
Today, the latest-generation electronic landing system (a Category 3 Instrument Landing System) will be switched on to improve safety margins in low-visibility conditions – including fog – making it the most advanced airport navigation system to operate in Australia.
It has been timed to be ready for Melbourne’s ”fog season”, which, for air traffic controllers, officially starts on April 1 and goes through to August 31.
Airservices Australia, the organisation responsible for air traffic control services in the nation’s airports, will also announce a $21 million technical centre to be built for staff to maintain air navigation equipment.
There’s also more technology coming to runways, with a laser-based visual range system to measure fog density and improved taxiway lighting for low-visibility conditions.
Airservices Australia and the airport corporation are set to introduce runway ”stop bars” between the taxiways and runways to reduce the likelihood of aircraft straying on to the runway in low-visibility conditions.
Just this week, the weather showed how it can interfere with flight schedules: Monday’s downpour resulted in two-thirds of morning peak flights departing late, and more than half of arrivals touching down late.
Melbourne Airport is the second-busiest airport in Australia with about 15,000 aircraft movements a month and, unlike Sydney, operates 24 hours a day, without curfew.
Work to construct the new 78-metre-tall air traffic control tower and the technical centre will commence almost immediately, Airservices Australia says. It will replace the existing one which is reaching the end of its serviceable life.
The landing system upgrade was the ”bee’s knees” of navigation technology, a spokesman said.
”The key to keeping schedules is to get them to land on time in the first place,” he said.
Source: The Age
By: steve rowell - 31st March 2010 at 08:47
I believe the whole International terminal has been or is being refurbished
By: KabirT - 31st March 2010 at 05:51
How is the work on the terminal going? I haven’t been to MEL since 2008 now (crickey :eek:). The MEL terminal at least till last time was in need of some serious upgrading.
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March 31, 2010 at 4:02 am