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Why we implement SBAS- NAMA MD

In other not to be caught napping in the ‘No Country Left Behind (NCLB) crusade being spearheaded by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency (NAMA) has joined in the concept which have been found as the better ways of detecting and correcting satellite errors with the recent test-run and implementation of the Satellite-Based Augmentation System (SBAS) in Abuja.

The SBAS according to key players will provide a cost-effective solution for navigation within the country and beyond where the deployment of ground-based equipment is not cost-effective, especially at smaller airports and private aerodromes.

The availability of the SBAS services therefore, courtesy of NAMA will be everywhere within the region unlike the ground base that has defined service volumes outside which there is no coverage, that is, there is continuity of service and reference point and computing the errors.

According to the managing director of NAMA, mr Matthew Lawrence Pwajok, since it is required that every service must have redundancy, the implementation of the SBAS offers better improvement in terms of availability of service.

His words: “When we have the ground-based navigational facilities, we still went ahead to implement performance-based navigation. The ground equipment is susceptible to power fluctuations, weather changes and also technical errors, and maintenance issues. It is a system that can go off and it should have an alternative. An aircraft that is approaching landing, if the equipment suddenly goes off because of power fluctuation, or an animal crosses it and affects the signal, it should have an alternative.”

“You can’t close the airport because the ground equipment has gone off because of power or some environmental factors that are affecting it. We must have a contingency and that is required even by the NCAA regulation that for every service that you provide, you must have a backup.

“For the power system that you provide, you normally have about two or three redundancies. If any fails, you can’t have all of them failing, so now if we have an instrument landing system, yes we are investing heavily in it. Some airlines might decide to remain using the normal system and they might be comfortable and it might be okay for them as long as it gives them access to the airport for landing and takeoff.

“It is going to be at the discretion of airlines, we are not going to force any airline to have to fit it in. If you are comfortable with instrument landing equipment, we are going to deploy it and we do that as a requirement to have a backup for every service we provide.

“For us, it is not that we are going to decommission the instrument landing system; we want to provide an alternative for our airspace users knowing the technicality of the service that they provide. “We won’t want to deny anybody assess to an airport because one piece of equipment is not working. We have satellite means of communication, we have terrestrial communication systems. For our surveillance, we have ground surveillance radar and satellite surveillance. We are providing adequate backups.”

in his remarks, Director, of Engineering Services at NAMA, Engineer Farouk Ahmed Umar, explained that the SBAS was seen to provide a cost-effective solution for navigation within the country and beyond where the deployment of ground-based equipment is not cost-effective, especially at smaller airports and private aerodromes.

“Error-corrected signal was then transmitted to users as augmentation signals to improve the accuracies of the raw satellite signals being received by users. If the error-corrected signals are transmitted at each localized area from the ground directly to users it is called GBAS, and if the error-corrected signals are relayed and transmitted to users through geostationary satellites to the users, it is called SBAS”, Farouk declared.

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