Anniversary – SATCO ATC system handed over in Amsterdam

50 year anniversary of SATCO handover 15 July 2010

 

If you look it up in an aviation dictionary, you will likely find that SATCO stands for Senior Air Traffic Controller. But the original meaning is much more exotic! SATCO was the abbreviation of Signaal Automatic Air Traffic Control, an automated ATC system FIFTY years ago!
SATCO was built by Hollandse Signaalapparaten in Hengelo, The Netherlands based on the ideas of Mr. A. T. Martinsen, a wartime military air traffic control officer. Development of the system took four years and implementation was planned to take place in three phases.

After installation of Phase one in the Schiphol control tower, the system was handed over to the Dutch CAA on 15 July 1960. Things must have gone pretty well because the thing was in 24 hour operational service from October of the same year and by January 1961 all flights in and out of Schiphol were handled by the new system. Everything is relative of course… Every two weeks a half day maintenance was required and there were two weeks with the system down for major changes. There were also minor breakdowns but their numbers were limited.

Many experts agreed that at the time SATCO was probably the most modern ATC system in the world and an FAA visitor to Hollandse Signaalapparaten was of the opinion that the system was two to four years ahead of developments in the USA.
The machine was capable of printing flight progress strips with automatically calculated estimates and was even smart enough to automatically select the teleprinter with the correct color paper in it, yellow for Eastbounds and blue for Westbounds. When something changed and the “computing device” was informed of the change, new strips with new estimates were printed with “lightning” speed… No doubt all this must have looked magic back then.

That SATCO’s designers were really thinking out of the box is shown clearly by the features they built in or planned for later phases. If the neighboring centre was also SATCO equipped, fully automatic data exchange was possible. Hollandsignaal was the only company building something like this, so they were no doubt hoping to see Europe equip with their baby… Data link capability was being planned for later phases.
If we now consider that making neighboring ATC centers capable of seamless communication with each other is one of the urgent tasks of SESAR to-day and data link is still not in general use, it is easy to see what a future oriented system SATCO must have been.
You will have noted that the words Automatic Air Traffic Control appear in the name of SATCO. When many many years and another system generation after SATCO we started work on the new Amsterdam ATC system, it was at first called Amsterdam Automated ATC or AAA. The name was short lived however. AAA remained but we had to change “Automated” to “Advanced”. Controllers insisted that there was no such thing as automated air traffic control…