ASECNA and CNES sign cooperation agreement on operational SBAS in Africa

Safety of Air Navigation in Africa and Madagascar (ASECNA) and the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES), have have signed a new agreement concerning the project to develop, deploy and commission ASECNA’s Satellite Based Augmentation System (SBAS).

The seven-year agreement sets out the terms and provisions for providing oversight assistance in systems engineering for the ground segment, the space segment and system performance.

CNES has been working with ASECNA to design its SBAS since 2011, notably on research and development to improve ionospheric disturbance processing algorithms. From 2017 to 2021, CNES assisted ASECNA with oversight of the system definition and design phase. This phase also demonstrated with real test signals in 2020 and 2021 the fitness of technical choices and the quality of services targeted for the expected service zone, while conducting field demonstrations to promote the system’s benefits to users.

This implementation of SBAS in Africa, affording a common capability developed by a large number of nations, marks a further step towards the construct ion of a single sky for managing the continent’s air traffic, thereby supporting the Single African Air Transport Market (SAATM) and the African Union Agenda 2063.

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