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ATCAJournal.Q4.2014.Article_Li

Stefan Groenendal
Stefan Groenendal

1) Civil air traffic controllers play a crucial role in supporting national security by detecting anomalies in flight behavior and alerting military authorities. However, with increasing air traffic, focusing primarily on safety means anomalies not affecting safety can be missed. 2) The article proposes introducing automated "security nets" to detect anomalies like deviations from flight plans, loss of communication or transponders, to expedite military response. This requires information sharing between civil and military air traffic control. 3) Examples from Germany and NATO initiatives show civil-military coordination systems providing real-time flight information to military controllers. The next step is incident coordination across borders and domains to rapidly share information and coordinate responses to security incidents.

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A New Approach to Monitoring and Alerting Congestion in Airspace Sectors Plus Avoiding Clouds Associated with Core Engine Icing Technology Changes Affecting NAS Voice Delay Requirements Transforming Flight Information Exchange via Flight Object and FIXM www.atca.org Winter 2014 | VOLUME 56, NO. 4
NATIONAL SECURITY When Time is of the Essence By Walter Strijland, 42 Solutions B.V. Abstract Civil air traffic control officers (ATCOs) play a crucial role in supporting nation- al security. Breaches in national secu- rity require a decisive and timely response. A prerequisite to detecting these breaches is the dissemination of information from civil to military authorities. However, the sheer amount of information and the primary focus on safety creates a whole new area of blind spots. Automated security nets and inci- dent management systems are needed to illuminate these spots and allow the proper authorities to focus the attention on the actual anomalies and to coordi- nate the proper responses. ATCO Support to National Security Civil-military coordination is often viewed from an airspace management perspective. The ownership and use of airspace is coordinated between two distinct user groups. However, the cooperation between the civil and mil- itary bodies extends to a wide variety of areas beyond airspace management. Quite frequently, civil ATCOs play a cru- cial role in supporting national security. Safeguarding national security is a complex process mainly because of the overwhelming amount of informa- tion on actual civil flight movements. It is important for air defense to estab- lish if a flight is cooperative. In other Winter 201450
words, is the flight complying with the standing rules and regulations, the approved flight plan/profile, etc.? Detection of a non-cooperative flight would render it suspect. What fol- lows is an in-depth assessment of the probable cause(s) and risks in order to initiate appropriate measures. Unfortunately, to detect if a flight is cooperative, air defense requires knowledge about the active instruc- tions issued by the civil ATCO. Such information is disseminated to a cer- tain extent (e.g., by means of flight plan distribution) but often lacks real- time amendments. Even with full access to complete flight profile information, scrutinizing the air situation in search of non-co- operative flights would be a tremen- dous activity that largely copies the role the civil ATCO is already fulfill- ing. Consequently, civil ATCOs play a crucial role in detecting anomalous behavior. It is the ATCO who is most likely to be the first to detect anoma- lies - to investigate these and to alert the appropriate partners where needed. Thus, they hand over responsibility to the national security domain. Indicators show that air traffic has shown fairly constant growth over the past decade. The ever-increasing amount of traffic implies that Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) and ATCOs face the challenge of coping with the increase. At the same time they are challenged to improve performance, reduce cost, and ensure safety. The ATCOs extracurricular responsibility of supporting national security con- flicts with this challenge. To deal with the increasing amount of information, the ATCO has to compartmentalize and focus on the responsibility of ensuring safety (not security). This implies that anomalies that are not, or at least not evidently, undermining safety can easily slip the ATCOs attention. The recent MH370 incident and It is the ATCO who is most likely to be the first to detect anomalies to investigate these and to alert the appropriate partners where needed. NATIONAL SECURITY ADHunter/Shutterstock.com The Journal of Air Traffic Control 51
the 9/11 attacks illustrate how factual above challenges are. As the MH370 flight incident shows, compartmen- talizing responsibilities, though effective in terms of safety critical decision-making, implicitly creates blind spots with regards to accidental or intentional non-cooperativeness. The reports on the 9/11 attack show that although the anomalies were detect- ed at an early stage, interpretation and consequential reporting to NORAD took quite some time [1] . In both scenar- ios, ATCO awareness, alertness and promptness play a crucial latent securi- ty role in a safety mindset. Note that the above statement is based on the assumption that losing cov- erage of MH370 could have been regard- ed as an anomaly. ICAO, CANSO, and IATA are investigating the possibility to establish global tracking capabili- ties to eliminate such coverage gaps. Still, from the ATCO perspective the MH370 was safely handed over to Ho Chi Minh[2] so a loss of coverage in Malaysian airspace would no longer have been of interest to the ATCO. Introducing Security Nets Most ANSPs provide ample mecha- nisms to automatically flag safety critical situations that require imme- diate ATCO attention (safety nets)[3] . Similarly, military centers, which mon- itor air traffic from a security point of view, could introduce mechanism to flag anomalies that require the atten- tion of air defense, or even rescue coor- dination centers. The concept of security nets caters to supporting the military controllers with the detection of these anomalies. Thus, this limits the active monitoring requirement to the set of flights that are suspect. The types of anomalies and the required response are diverse. In gener- al, the security nets should trigger any breach of contract between the ATCO and a pilot. This could be based on any information that can be derived auto- matically like deviation from the agreed flight profile (route, cleared flight level, ETO), unexpected transponder chang- es, transponder loss, or even a lack of voice communication (although this would require a special infrastructure). Of course, it could also cater for detec- tion of security breaches (spoofing). Automatic detection can expedite a scramble of Quick Reaction Alert inter- ceptors, or a swift SAR operation. In the MH370 scenario, security nets could have resulted in an instant alert based on a loss of coverage (tran- sponder loss), which could have led to an instantaneous response. The Need for Information A prerequisite for such a security net mechanism is voluntary information dissemination from civil centers to the military domain. The embellishment voluntary is not superfluous as shar- ing information on ATCO decisions requires bilateral agreement to avoid the impression of having a big brother watching ATCO activities, but such data dissemination is not unheard of. Civil-military coordination in Germany has been listed as an exem- plary case in terms of flexible use of airspace[4] . But the German Air Force also has an impressive record of sound coordination with the civil ANSPs in terms of air defense activities going back as far as 1979. At that time, EUROCONTROL Upper Area Control centers in Maastricht and Karlsruhe provided real time information to the military domain (CRCs), thus improv- ing the actual situational awareness and limiting the coordination effort by effectively bringing the real time civil ATC picture to the air defense sites. In 2003, EUROCONTROL took the initiative to equip the CDCs of the French Air Force with a ported variant (now called CIMACT) of the German system to further improve civil-military coordination in cross border areas. Both systems showed real-time flight plans Civil Air Picture illustrating the amount of information on civil flight movements Maastricht UAC ATCO NATIONAL SECURITY Winter 201452
and track details containing most of the essential ATCO inputs[7] . In the pre-9/11 world, the above examples of presenting the civil air pic- ture to the military controller sufficed. It enabled the air defense operators to identify air traffic as known and under civil control which rendered it friendly (non-threatening). This, sadly, has proven to be a flawed assumption (though, in terms of pure civil-military separation coordination it still suffices). As the 9/11 attacks have demonstrated, any flight, at any time, in or near sov- ereign airspace could become suspect. Introducing Incident Coordination In 2006 the interoperability and adapt- ability of CIMACT was recognized by the NATO as a viable basis for the imple- mentation of the NATO-Russia Councils Cooperative Airspace Initiative. This ini- tiative, conceived in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, focused on providing increased transparency, early notification of sus- picious air activities, rapid coordination and joint responses to security incidents in the European airspace, including ter- rorists threats.[5] This next evolutionary step added the concept of cross-border (multi- state), cross-domain (civil-military as well as military-military) coordination to the equation. Within the CAI initia- tive this multi-state approach has been demonstrated and validated in several live Vigilant Skies events. The system allowed operators in different coun- tries to easily exchange informationand coordinate responses, thus adding an incident management capability to the CIMACT platform. It is interesting to observe that the 9/11 attack response was hampered by the fact that NEADS did not know where to send the alert fighter aircraft.[1] The incident management capability caters for this particular real-time relay of information. Still, as stated previously, enabling coordination and information sharing might just add to the workload. A more active approach seemed required and since actively monitoring all flights in sovereign airspace is a near to impossi- ble task, a solution was sought in estab- lishing security nets. It was in this context that a first security net concept was demonstrated to the CAI programme manager with- in NATO. This demonstration, how- ever, could offer tangible results only because of the presence of regular- ly updated information, which includ- ed sufficient flight profile information that could be monitored (current flight plan, cleared flight levels, present/next SSR, etc.). Obtaining this information is where todays challenges lie. The Next Step Todays ANSP systems are closed and do not readily offer this informa- tion to the extent needed. Of course, interoperability regulation ensures that a certain inter-center level of informa- tion is available but access to intra-cen- ter information is not readily dissem- inated. It often takes special legacy interfaces to extract actual flight profile information as defined by the ATCO that is currently controlling the flight from todays ANSP systems. Within the scope of SESAR IOP-G groundwork is laid for harmonizing such information streams by disclos- ing real-time 4D trajectory info (Flight Objects) in a networked environment (SWIM/PENS). By giving the military access to this environment the possi- bility arises to fully transfer the respon- sibility of security related activities to the military domain[6] . The Global ATM Security Management Project funded by the EU might offer the means to further develop above security nets and estab- lish real-time information gathering by liaising with the SESAR IOP-G work- groups. Within the GAMMA scope, the incident management capabilities will be expanded even further, bridging the information sharing gap between air defense organizations and ANSPs[8] . Additional security nets can expedite responses and reduce the dependency on civil ATCO vigilance. Authors Note This article is not meant as a scientific paper but is meant to be informational and expresses the authors viewpoint on the topic. The author aims to estab- lish wider awareness and promote a Civil ATCOs play a crucial role in supporting national security. Interceptors during Vigilant Skies NATIONAL SECURITY PhotoscourtesyofWalterStrijland The Journal of Air Traffic Control 53
common agreement on broadening ways for multi-stake- holder cooperation to support national security organisa- tions in coping with their challenges. Walter Strijland has been working in the area of civil- military Cooperation since 1994 starting with ADMAR 2000. As a founding partner of 42 Solutions, a Dutch IT solution provider, he and co-founder Bert Brouwer have supported and worked on several European initiatives in the scope of security. Their work on CIMACT formed the foundation of what later became the CAI system. 42 Solutions endeavors to continue their work on the development of incident management and security net capabilities within the scope of GAMMA. They have developed a wide-area situational display that allows for global coordination. References [1.] The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (9/11 Report), July 22, 2004, U.S. Government Printing Office [2.] MH370 Preliminary Report, 2014, Ministry of Transport Malaysia [3.] Safety Nets Ensuring Effectiveness Guide, 2012, EUROCONTROL [4.] ICAO CIR-330 AN/189 Civil/Military Cooperation in Air Traffic Management, 2011, ICAO [5] CAI Fact Sheet for the Media, 2011, PANSA [5.] CAI Fact Sheet for the Media, 2011, PANSA [6.] Roadmap on Enhanced Civil-Military CNS Interoperability and Technology Convergence, 2013, EUROCONTROL [7] https://www.eurocontrol.int/services/civil-military-atm-co-ordina tion-tool-cimact [8] http://www.gamma-project.eu/ Concept gamma contribution NATIONAL SECURITY IllustrationcourtesyofWalterStrijland Winter 201454 Twinning Center De Zaale 11 P.O.Box 80 5600 AB Eindhoven The Netherlands T: +31 40 239 0 720 E: bd-atm@42solutions.nl W: http://www.42solutions.nl

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ATCAJournal.Q4.2014.Article_Li

  • 1. A New Approach to Monitoring and Alerting Congestion in Airspace Sectors Plus Avoiding Clouds Associated with Core Engine Icing Technology Changes Affecting NAS Voice Delay Requirements Transforming Flight Information Exchange via Flight Object and FIXM www.atca.org Winter 2014 | VOLUME 56, NO. 4
  • 2. NATIONAL SECURITY When Time is of the Essence By Walter Strijland, 42 Solutions B.V. Abstract Civil air traffic control officers (ATCOs) play a crucial role in supporting nation- al security. Breaches in national secu- rity require a decisive and timely response. A prerequisite to detecting these breaches is the dissemination of information from civil to military authorities. However, the sheer amount of information and the primary focus on safety creates a whole new area of blind spots. Automated security nets and inci- dent management systems are needed to illuminate these spots and allow the proper authorities to focus the attention on the actual anomalies and to coordi- nate the proper responses. ATCO Support to National Security Civil-military coordination is often viewed from an airspace management perspective. The ownership and use of airspace is coordinated between two distinct user groups. However, the cooperation between the civil and mil- itary bodies extends to a wide variety of areas beyond airspace management. Quite frequently, civil ATCOs play a cru- cial role in supporting national security. Safeguarding national security is a complex process mainly because of the overwhelming amount of informa- tion on actual civil flight movements. It is important for air defense to estab- lish if a flight is cooperative. In other Winter 201450
  • 3. words, is the flight complying with the standing rules and regulations, the approved flight plan/profile, etc.? Detection of a non-cooperative flight would render it suspect. What fol- lows is an in-depth assessment of the probable cause(s) and risks in order to initiate appropriate measures. Unfortunately, to detect if a flight is cooperative, air defense requires knowledge about the active instruc- tions issued by the civil ATCO. Such information is disseminated to a cer- tain extent (e.g., by means of flight plan distribution) but often lacks real- time amendments. Even with full access to complete flight profile information, scrutinizing the air situation in search of non-co- operative flights would be a tremen- dous activity that largely copies the role the civil ATCO is already fulfill- ing. Consequently, civil ATCOs play a crucial role in detecting anomalous behavior. It is the ATCO who is most likely to be the first to detect anoma- lies - to investigate these and to alert the appropriate partners where needed. Thus, they hand over responsibility to the national security domain. Indicators show that air traffic has shown fairly constant growth over the past decade. The ever-increasing amount of traffic implies that Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) and ATCOs face the challenge of coping with the increase. At the same time they are challenged to improve performance, reduce cost, and ensure safety. The ATCOs extracurricular responsibility of supporting national security con- flicts with this challenge. To deal with the increasing amount of information, the ATCO has to compartmentalize and focus on the responsibility of ensuring safety (not security). This implies that anomalies that are not, or at least not evidently, undermining safety can easily slip the ATCOs attention. The recent MH370 incident and It is the ATCO who is most likely to be the first to detect anomalies to investigate these and to alert the appropriate partners where needed. NATIONAL SECURITY ADHunter/Shutterstock.com The Journal of Air Traffic Control 51
  • 4. the 9/11 attacks illustrate how factual above challenges are. As the MH370 flight incident shows, compartmen- talizing responsibilities, though effective in terms of safety critical decision-making, implicitly creates blind spots with regards to accidental or intentional non-cooperativeness. The reports on the 9/11 attack show that although the anomalies were detect- ed at an early stage, interpretation and consequential reporting to NORAD took quite some time [1] . In both scenar- ios, ATCO awareness, alertness and promptness play a crucial latent securi- ty role in a safety mindset. Note that the above statement is based on the assumption that losing cov- erage of MH370 could have been regard- ed as an anomaly. ICAO, CANSO, and IATA are investigating the possibility to establish global tracking capabili- ties to eliminate such coverage gaps. Still, from the ATCO perspective the MH370 was safely handed over to Ho Chi Minh[2] so a loss of coverage in Malaysian airspace would no longer have been of interest to the ATCO. Introducing Security Nets Most ANSPs provide ample mecha- nisms to automatically flag safety critical situations that require imme- diate ATCO attention (safety nets)[3] . Similarly, military centers, which mon- itor air traffic from a security point of view, could introduce mechanism to flag anomalies that require the atten- tion of air defense, or even rescue coor- dination centers. The concept of security nets caters to supporting the military controllers with the detection of these anomalies. Thus, this limits the active monitoring requirement to the set of flights that are suspect. The types of anomalies and the required response are diverse. In gener- al, the security nets should trigger any breach of contract between the ATCO and a pilot. This could be based on any information that can be derived auto- matically like deviation from the agreed flight profile (route, cleared flight level, ETO), unexpected transponder chang- es, transponder loss, or even a lack of voice communication (although this would require a special infrastructure). Of course, it could also cater for detec- tion of security breaches (spoofing). Automatic detection can expedite a scramble of Quick Reaction Alert inter- ceptors, or a swift SAR operation. In the MH370 scenario, security nets could have resulted in an instant alert based on a loss of coverage (tran- sponder loss), which could have led to an instantaneous response. The Need for Information A prerequisite for such a security net mechanism is voluntary information dissemination from civil centers to the military domain. The embellishment voluntary is not superfluous as shar- ing information on ATCO decisions requires bilateral agreement to avoid the impression of having a big brother watching ATCO activities, but such data dissemination is not unheard of. Civil-military coordination in Germany has been listed as an exem- plary case in terms of flexible use of airspace[4] . But the German Air Force also has an impressive record of sound coordination with the civil ANSPs in terms of air defense activities going back as far as 1979. At that time, EUROCONTROL Upper Area Control centers in Maastricht and Karlsruhe provided real time information to the military domain (CRCs), thus improv- ing the actual situational awareness and limiting the coordination effort by effectively bringing the real time civil ATC picture to the air defense sites. In 2003, EUROCONTROL took the initiative to equip the CDCs of the French Air Force with a ported variant (now called CIMACT) of the German system to further improve civil-military coordination in cross border areas. Both systems showed real-time flight plans Civil Air Picture illustrating the amount of information on civil flight movements Maastricht UAC ATCO NATIONAL SECURITY Winter 201452
  • 5. and track details containing most of the essential ATCO inputs[7] . In the pre-9/11 world, the above examples of presenting the civil air pic- ture to the military controller sufficed. It enabled the air defense operators to identify air traffic as known and under civil control which rendered it friendly (non-threatening). This, sadly, has proven to be a flawed assumption (though, in terms of pure civil-military separation coordination it still suffices). As the 9/11 attacks have demonstrated, any flight, at any time, in or near sov- ereign airspace could become suspect. Introducing Incident Coordination In 2006 the interoperability and adapt- ability of CIMACT was recognized by the NATO as a viable basis for the imple- mentation of the NATO-Russia Councils Cooperative Airspace Initiative. This ini- tiative, conceived in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, focused on providing increased transparency, early notification of sus- picious air activities, rapid coordination and joint responses to security incidents in the European airspace, including ter- rorists threats.[5] This next evolutionary step added the concept of cross-border (multi- state), cross-domain (civil-military as well as military-military) coordination to the equation. Within the CAI initia- tive this multi-state approach has been demonstrated and validated in several live Vigilant Skies events. The system allowed operators in different coun- tries to easily exchange informationand coordinate responses, thus adding an incident management capability to the CIMACT platform. It is interesting to observe that the 9/11 attack response was hampered by the fact that NEADS did not know where to send the alert fighter aircraft.[1] The incident management capability caters for this particular real-time relay of information. Still, as stated previously, enabling coordination and information sharing might just add to the workload. A more active approach seemed required and since actively monitoring all flights in sovereign airspace is a near to impossi- ble task, a solution was sought in estab- lishing security nets. It was in this context that a first security net concept was demonstrated to the CAI programme manager with- in NATO. This demonstration, how- ever, could offer tangible results only because of the presence of regular- ly updated information, which includ- ed sufficient flight profile information that could be monitored (current flight plan, cleared flight levels, present/next SSR, etc.). Obtaining this information is where todays challenges lie. The Next Step Todays ANSP systems are closed and do not readily offer this informa- tion to the extent needed. Of course, interoperability regulation ensures that a certain inter-center level of informa- tion is available but access to intra-cen- ter information is not readily dissem- inated. It often takes special legacy interfaces to extract actual flight profile information as defined by the ATCO that is currently controlling the flight from todays ANSP systems. Within the scope of SESAR IOP-G groundwork is laid for harmonizing such information streams by disclos- ing real-time 4D trajectory info (Flight Objects) in a networked environment (SWIM/PENS). By giving the military access to this environment the possi- bility arises to fully transfer the respon- sibility of security related activities to the military domain[6] . The Global ATM Security Management Project funded by the EU might offer the means to further develop above security nets and estab- lish real-time information gathering by liaising with the SESAR IOP-G work- groups. Within the GAMMA scope, the incident management capabilities will be expanded even further, bridging the information sharing gap between air defense organizations and ANSPs[8] . Additional security nets can expedite responses and reduce the dependency on civil ATCO vigilance. Authors Note This article is not meant as a scientific paper but is meant to be informational and expresses the authors viewpoint on the topic. The author aims to estab- lish wider awareness and promote a Civil ATCOs play a crucial role in supporting national security. Interceptors during Vigilant Skies NATIONAL SECURITY PhotoscourtesyofWalterStrijland The Journal of Air Traffic Control 53
  • 6. common agreement on broadening ways for multi-stake- holder cooperation to support national security organisa- tions in coping with their challenges. Walter Strijland has been working in the area of civil- military Cooperation since 1994 starting with ADMAR 2000. As a founding partner of 42 Solutions, a Dutch IT solution provider, he and co-founder Bert Brouwer have supported and worked on several European initiatives in the scope of security. Their work on CIMACT formed the foundation of what later became the CAI system. 42 Solutions endeavors to continue their work on the development of incident management and security net capabilities within the scope of GAMMA. They have developed a wide-area situational display that allows for global coordination. References [1.] The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (9/11 Report), July 22, 2004, U.S. Government Printing Office [2.] MH370 Preliminary Report, 2014, Ministry of Transport Malaysia [3.] Safety Nets Ensuring Effectiveness Guide, 2012, EUROCONTROL [4.] ICAO CIR-330 AN/189 Civil/Military Cooperation in Air Traffic Management, 2011, ICAO [5] CAI Fact Sheet for the Media, 2011, PANSA [5.] CAI Fact Sheet for the Media, 2011, PANSA [6.] Roadmap on Enhanced Civil-Military CNS Interoperability and Technology Convergence, 2013, EUROCONTROL [7] https://www.eurocontrol.int/services/civil-military-atm-co-ordina tion-tool-cimact [8] http://www.gamma-project.eu/ Concept gamma contribution NATIONAL SECURITY IllustrationcourtesyofWalterStrijland Winter 201454 Twinning Center De Zaale 11 P.O.Box 80 5600 AB Eindhoven The Netherlands T: +31 40 239 0 720 E: bd-atm@42solutions.nl W: http://www.42solutions.nl