More than 15 years after it was conceived - in the year that
Margaret Thatcher won her third term as prime minister - the New En
Route Centre air traffic control system at Swanwick in Hampshire
has finally gone live.
Although the system is five years late the operator of the Swanwick
centre, National Air Traffic Services, believes that adherence to
January's operational date is a major achievement.
As the system is a safety-critical application, responsible for
providing aircraft and radar data to help controllers to guide
planes in and out of UK air space, the software's two million lines
of code have had to pass independent safety, resilience and
integrity checks.
Once there were 21,000 bugs in the software. Now there are none.
But the project will go down in IT history, not so much because it
surpasses all others in terms of technological advancement, but
because it has taken longer to plan and build than it will be in
operation.
A major off-the-shelf software system to control the skies around
airports will be introduced at Swanwick as early as 2007. The main
system, which has cost about £337m to develop, will start to be
replaced between 2010 and 2012.
Meanwhile National Air Traffic Services could soon break another
record. Next week it will be fighting a £40m writ issued by its PFI
contractor, EDS, in what could become the longest High Court battle
over an IT dispute.