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BAE SYSTEMS ClearFlite® Software Wins Maastricht Award Recognizing
Excellence in Air Traffic Safety
San Diego
-- BAE Systems received an industry award for its contributions to air traffic safety at the 16th annual ATC Maastricht Exhibition and Conference in February.
Six awards are presented each year at ATC Maastricht, an annual conference for the air traffic control and management industry, to recognize contributions to air traffic management safety and capacity. BAE Systems’ ClearFlite software was nominated for the award by David Rider of Jane’s Airport Review.
ClearFlite is a digital mapping tool developed for the aviation industry to help operators identify and collect vertical obstructions in and around airfields. Available in BAE Systems’ SOCET SET® software package, ClearFlite uses images acquired from aircraft or satellites along with other SOCET SET functionality to help operators define obstructions more efficiently, with a higher degree of accuracy.
“We have used ClearFlite for many years in all of our DoD and commercial airport mapping programs,” said Dejan Damjanovic, program manager for GeoEye™, the world’s largest commercial remote sensing company. “For a single solution that supports mapping of terrain, obstacles, and airport features, nothing beats ClearFlite.”
BAE Systems developed ClearFlite in response to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s Ron Brown Airfield Initiative, created after a fatal plane crash in 1996 in Dubrovnik, Croatia, which killed U.S. Commerce Secretary Ronald Brown and 33 other passengers and crew. The accident was attributed to poor weather conditions, a lack of knowledge of the airfield environment, and an off-course approach.
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| Virtual polygons, or “surfaces,” are defined in 3-D space sloping up from the end of each runway end until reaching the end of the surface. Such surfaces around an airport must be kept clear of obstacles. | Satellites that can collect in-track or same-pass stereo digital imagery, as shown in this IKONOS image of Portugal’s Madeira Airport, are particularly helpful in today’s post-9/11 world because aerial operators often need permission to fly over sensitive areas such as airports and harbors. | ClearFlite performs thorough and cost-effective flight obstruction analyses. Users can automatically delineate vertical obstructions by intersecting a terrain file with an obstruction surface. |