Nation-scale airspace and procedural redesign across an entire country.
The host country was approaching the ceiling of what its legacy airspace could absorb. Procedures had aged out of the era of paper strips and conventional navigation. Sector boundaries had calcified around fleets and route structures that no longer matched the traffic flowing through them. The mandate was clear: bring the entire system, end to end, into a contemporary, performance-based shape.
GANS was engaged as the lead delivery partner. The remit covered new Performance-Based Navigation arrivals (STARs) and departures (SIDs), holds, instrument approach procedures, and missed approach procedures. It covered additional approach sectors inside the CTA so peak-hour load could be split across more controllers. And it covered the readiness path that gets controllers, dispatchers, and airline operations comfortable with the change before the cutover, not after.
Every part of the system was touched. Every stakeholder had to be brought along. Nothing could break in the meantime.
The engagement began the way most national-scale aviation programmers do: not with a clean sheet, but with a busy one. Traffic was still climbing, the regulator was already anticipating the next inspection cycle, and the airlines had fleet refreshes on the horizon that the existing procedures could not absorb. The brief landed in that environment.
GANS led the technical design and then ran the validation, but the work was always going to be larger than either of those roles. Designing new arrivals and departures means negotiating with the airlines whose fleets will fly them. Splitting an Approach sector means rewriting the letters of agreement that govern who hands what to whom and where. Adding holds means rewriting parts of the controller training pack. Every change touched another change.
The team worked through it the same way the team handles every programme of this scale: in phases, with stand-by procedures ready at each gate, and with the regulator briefed on the failure modes before they could happen.
The engagement began the way most national-scale aviation programmers do: not with a clean sheet, but with a busy one. Traffic was still climbing, the regulator was already anticipating the next inspection cycle, and the airlines had fleet refreshes on the horizon that the existing procedures could not absorb. The brief landed in that environment.
GANS led the technical design and then ran the validation, but the work was always going to be larger than either of those roles. Designing new arrivals and departures means negotiating with the airlines whose fleets will fly them. Splitting an Approach sector means rewriting the letters of agreement that govern who hands what to whom and where. Adding holds means rewriting parts of the controller training pack. Every change touched another change.
The team worked through it the same way the team handles every programme of this scale: in phases, with stand-by procedures ready at each gate, and with the regulator briefed on the failure modes before they could happen.