A brief on intranet briefing (and other applications of intranets in air navigation and air traffic control)

The Internet and intranets are now widely recognised as effective mechanisms for the provision of multimedia information. Likewise, air navigation, air traffic control and related activities all require a large amount of information, documents, graphics etc., to be accessed by air traffic controllers, pilots and flight planning departments. The use of Internet and intranet technologies to meet these requirements is now becoming more widespread. The applications deployed include the distribution of NOTAM (Notices to Airmen) information, navigation bulletins, aeronautical information circulars, operational procedures and meteorological information. These applications are further developing from standard passive browsing sessions, to considerably more complex interactive client server applications, using the Web Server as a gateway to live database and application servers which can perform significant tasks such as complex database retrieval and flight planning calculations based on user input. The paper examines the use of intranet and Web technologies in delivering information in a number of methods and the different applications within air navigation and air traffic control that can be best served by the intranet. The paper concludes with an examination of the issues in delivering these applications over the intranet.