Laser-Scan recently announced the further extension of its Air Mapping and Charting user community, following the purchase of the award winning Aeronautical Production System (APS) by the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). With over 2500 customers and the desire to increase the number of products it delivers, the RAAF sought an application suite that would allow its existing team in Melbourne to meet this objective. Laser-Scan’s APS suite delivers this capability through a number of Air Charting technology breakthroughs based on Laser-Scan’s object orientated Gothic database. The breakthroughs include temporal updates, which include innovative temporal functionality allowing amendments to be made to the database at any time, regardless of the amendment’s activation date. This major breakthrough in the aeronautical chart production process allows air cartographers to make continual updates beyond the current work cycle, reducing peaks and troughs in their workload.
The APS is the first system to fully implement Digital Aeronautical Flight Information File (DAFIF) rules. Data can be amended using a suite of bespoke, purpose built user interfaces. As each amendment is committed it is automatically validated against the rules. Any invalid data will be rejected, thereby guaranteeing excellent data quality that is essential for flight safety. It has a single continuous database. Laser-Scan’s advanced technology models the globe within a single geographical dataset. This allows aeronautical features to cross the International Date Line, plus the North and South Poles.
It also includes intelligent charts. The intelligent map features recognise how to display themselves when interacting with other features, e.g. air space boundaries use different styles of representation depending on whether or not they share a boundary segment with another feature. This intelligence is achieved through Laser-Scan’s combination of attribution and flexible technology.
