The Government authorises the telecommunications service for air traffic control to be tendered for 36.1 million euros

The Council of Ministers today authorised the Ministry of Transport and Sustainable Mobility to tender a contract through ENAIRE, the national air navigation service provider, to renew the telecommunications service for its air traffic control systems through services with dual operators, for an estimated amount of 36.1 million euros (not including VAT). The contract is for three years, with options for two annual extensions.

The provision of these services includes control centres and towers, radar stations, communications centres and navaids

The purpose of the investment is to consolidate a communications services framework that guarantees resilience in response to the expected growth of air traffic. As a result, ENAIRE will increase its capacity to adapt to possible situations that could jeopardise the availability of the telecommunications systems and services needed to guarantee the operability of the flights it manages.

This is a dual communications operator system, which provides redundancy and independence to the aforementioned telecommunications services to maintain operational normality in response to any eventuality or incident in the networks. This additional guarantee of operational and systems availability is significant for island territories.

More and better service performance

For a lower annual cost than that of the last few years, ENAIRE achieves through this contract a 40% increase in bandwidth at locations where the air navigation data network (REDAN) is located, mainly to include the entire project to remotely monitor the security systems of critical air navigation facilities.

Network performance and the use of optical fibre at the user end will be increased. As a result, ENAIRE will have the capacity to expand services and improve connections between its units.

Technical and procedural improvements

The contract approved today will provide additional technical improvements, such as independent fibre for the two operators of critical centres, such as air traffic control units, without outsourcing the infrastructure between them.

It also includes procedural improvements with stricter coordination protocols for scheduled activities, and more demanding incident turnaround times. The communications services will be provided primarily in administrative and network management centres, control centres, control towers, radar stations, RF transmission/receiving centres and navaid locations.

About ENAIRE

ENAIRE is the air navigation service provider in Spain.

As a company of the Ministry of Sustainable Transport and Mobility, it provides en route control services for all flights and overflights from five control centres in Madrid, Barcelona, Seville, Gran Canaria and Palma, as well as approach services to every airport in the country.

In addition, 46 airports receive communication, navigation and surveillance services from ENAIRE, which also maintains their air traffic control systems, and 21 of them, including the country's busiest airports, rely on its aerodrome air traffic control services.

ENAIRE is Europe's fourth largest air traffic manager and participates in the A6 Alliance, a coalition of air navigation providers responsible for over 80% of European air traffic, and which is seeking to modernise the air traffic management system. It is also a member of other international alliances promoting the Single European sky, such as SESAR Joint Undertaking, SESAR Deployment Manager, iTEC, CANSO and ICAO.

ENAIRE, as the responsible agency identified by the Ministry of Sustainable Transport and Mobility to implement the U-Space system in Spain, will, through its digital platform, provide the Common Information Services (CIS), which are essential to facilitate U-space services to drones and Urban Air Mobility in cooperation with local air traffic services, so that all types of aircraft can fly safely in the same airspace.

ENAIRE has received the highest score in Europe on the aviation safety key performance indicator for four years in a row. It has also been awarded the EFQM 500 Seal for its safe, efficient, innovative and sustainable management of air navigation services.