Airways wins job in Iran

By CHRIS DANIELS aviation writer

Airways New Zealand, the state-owned company charged with running our air traffic control, has won a contract to help the Iranian Government expand one of its airports.

Its international arm and a Malaysian company have won the consulting project to help expand an airport on Qeshm Island, off the southern coast of Iran.

Airways said commercial confidentiality meant it could not disclose the value of the Iranian contract, but that it was "significant".

News of the Iranian deal comes as Airways this week announced it had finished rolling out a new air traffic control system across New Zealand.

After three years of development and fine-tuning, the "SkyLine" system has now been installed in Airways' Christchurch control centre. Seventeen control towers have been upgraded.

The burden of the $15 million project has been eased through working alongside US aerospace and technology giant Lockheed Martin as a partner in bidding for overseas contracts.

Airways and Lockheed Martin recently won a contract to install the SkyLine system into seven Chinese military airfields.

The companies have also been bidding for air traffic control upgrades and installations in other countries.

Lockheed Martin supplies the hardware and software.

Airways customises and fine-tunes the systems for each particular location.

Airways spokesman Ken Mitchell said that the system took New Zealand's air traffic control away from the old-fashioned, "mainframe" technology to a windows-based approach.

It was a modular system, that could be easily expanded as air traffic levels increased.

Mitchell said that the whole system could be put onto a CD-Rom, which would enable the whole country's air control to be run from one tower, in the extremely unlikely event that would be needed.

In June this year Airways was named one of the top three providers of air navigation services in the world.

It made an after-tax profit of $6.8 million for the year to the end of June.