Airports to upgrade air traffic control

Shanghai's two major airports will begin using a new computerized air traffic control system by January 26 to make take-offs more efficient, the civil aviation authority announced Monday.

The Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) system will largely automate how air traffic control determines the order in which flights take off at Shanghai Hongqiao International and Shanghai Pudong International airports, according to a press release from the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) East China Regional Administration.

The system, which the CAAC developed, takes into account the numerous factors that affect air traffic control, including the weather, each flight's scheduled departure time and the status of other air traffic, to create a take-off sequence for all flights over a two-hour period.

The new system will be an improvement over the current person-to-person air traffic control system, said a Hongqiao airport air traffic controller surnamed Zhang.

"We spend a great deal of time coordinating flights when there is an emergency notice for events such as bad weather," Zhang told the Global Times.

Air traffic controllers typically order flights to take off in the order in which pilots report they are ready to depart.

Zhang said that the CDM system will also prevent pilots with personal connections with air traffic controllers from jumping ahead in the queue as the CDM take-off order will be open to all pilots, airports and airlines.

The CAAC plans to implement the CDM system at airports in Hangzhou, Xiamen, Nanjing, Qingdao and Fuzhou by the end of June, said Zhang Zichuan, a spokesman for the CAAC East China Regional Administration.

During a 10-day test run of the CDM system in Shanghai in December, flight delays for China Eastern Airlines fell by 3 percentage points, according to the CAAC press release.