Excerpts from Nav Canada’s

“Alternate Route – An Approach to Enhancing System Capacity”

• Future efforts towards boosting the performance and capability of on-board

avionics must emphasize achieving a more integrated design between aircraft
and the ground. The design must regard the aircraft, as well as operations
centers, as intelligent collaborators1.

• Projects need to be driven by operational utility and short, tight schedules within
the context of a plan that can be changed as implementation leads to increased
understanding. The deployment of advanced aids that will dramatically expand
controllers’ and pilots’ capabilities2 can – and should – proceed now.

• Some of the least successful undertakings in the field have been the result of
mixing research with implementation. We cannot afford the luxury of taking many
years to make modest improvements that should have already been made, while
blocking out more aggressive change.

• We must, instead, find alternate routes, making meaningful progress as we go

while taking advantage of current systems and developments3, avoiding repeated
development of the same capability, and being aggressive in appropriate areas.

• Many of the necessary technology systems already exist. We must make a

concerted effort to bring those systems out of the lab and into production,
supplanting process with progress.

• Our challenge is to accelerate collaboration among all stakeholder groups, and

to accelerate our development effort with a focus on making clear, incremental
improvements across the system4, as quickly as possible.

1
The concept would be to integrate the photo block planning, execution and post-processing addressing
the clients’, operators’ and ATC’s needs using Internet topography and appropriate integration to NavCan’s
control centres.
2
The bottleneck is the cumbersome and error-prone process of reviewing the outstanding contract
requirements, usable meteorological conditions and the airspace to be protected in real time. Missed
opportunities are costly, and accurate assessment of the required photo blocks is tedious, difficult to
visualize and not readily portable to the cockpit environment.
3
Current systems use GIS at the client level to digitize the photo lines into specific lat & long coordinates
which trigger the camera shutter. This would be packaged in accordance with the NavCan Pilot Procedures
Manual and ported to the ACC with photo blocks calculated by the GIS.
4
The photo block management challenge is to meet the needs of the clients and ATC with the
minimization of transit time and streamlining of pre-flight processes being the main areas for improvement.