FOR INMEDIATE RELEASE
July 20th, 2004

Flying High with ESRI (UK)

GIS from ESRI speeds chart production for Eurocontrol

July 20th 2004, Aylesbury - Eurocontrol (The European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation) has chosen ESRI (UK), a provider of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in the UK, to supply its new aeronautical chart production system. These charts underpin the everyday activities of Eurocontrol which include strategic and tactical flow management, regional control of airspace, collection of navigation charges and controller training.

The system will provide Eurocontrol with the flexibility to design, produce and print high quality charts to exact specifications. These charts are used across the organisation to help Eurocontrol's staff develop, coordinate and implement its pan-European air traffic management plans with the airspace users. Airspace Management and Sector charts are used for planning purposes and national air traffic staff and Central Flow Unit Management charts are used to establish "slot times" for aircraft.

The new ESRI system will replace an older chart production system in use at Eurocontrol and will offer improved production efficiency and the flexibility to generate new cartographic products and deliver other spatial services across the organisation. A considerable amount of effort was expended in the past on chart 'clean up' operations. As airspace charts change every 28 days the clean up process, which is highly repetitive, was a key resource driver. Moving to this 'next generation' ESRI system will allow Eurocontrol to cut back considerably on the manpower effort needed to produce and maintain its charts.

The system to be provided is built upon a number of ESRI products including the Production Line Tool Set (PLTS) Aeronautical Solution - a collection of software applications that allows users to create, manage and exploit multiple map product databases.

Under the terms of the agreement with Eurocontrol, ESRI (UK) and ESRI Inc (acting as a sub-contractor to ESRI (UK)) will be developing enhancements to PLTS to deliver the specific functionality required by Eurocontrol and to enable data in AIXM (Aeronautical Information Exchange Model) format to be used in the PLTS geodatabase. AIXM is an internationally recognised data format that enables aeronautical information to be quickly and easily shared and exchanged between relevant parties.

The customisation developed for Eurocontrol will become part of the core PLTS product suite and thus made available to other users.

Conrad Cleasby, Head of the Data Information and Analysis Business Division at Eurocontrol says: "The charts we produce are fundamental to Eurocontrol's everyday activities, so we needed a system that enabled us to produce them quickly, easily and accurately. We chose ESRI (UK) because of its proven expertise in the area of cartography and because its solution fully met our requirements for an automated cartographic system. Not only that, but ESRI's solution offers wider opportunities for the future to exploit our spatial data in other applications. The significant market penetration of ESRI will also enable us to use outsourcing as a means coping with peak production loads. At the same time, the more productive software will allow us to increase our levels of service internally in producing ad hoc charts in support of various studies."

Aeroterra S.A. is a privately held organization that since its creation in 1973 has been a leader of the geo-processing field in the Latin American market. As an exclusive distributor of ESRI Inc. and LEICA Geosystems in Argentina and Uruguay, Aeroterra has an installed base of over 8,000 licenses in more than 1,000 sites. According to market researches from the Inter-American Development Bank (1995) and the Government of Canada (1997/98), Aeroterra accounts for more than 80% of the GIS software market in Argentina. The company is composed by a multi-disciplinary team of professionals fully dedicated to tasks related to geo-processing using the most advanced tools available for providing geo-related solutions to clients throughout the world. The company has several strategic alliances with international organizations and a wide network of distributors and business partners.

ESRI (UK) delivers enterprise geographic information solutions to organisations in both public and private sectors in the UK. Founded 25 years ago, and with over 1600 customers, it is one of the largest and most experienced Geographic Information Systems (GIS) companies, combining market leading products, UK specific services, applications and data, to local authorities, central government, utilities and telecoms, defence and business markets. Examples of ESRI (UK)'s customers include Channel 4 Time Team, The Environment Agency, Leeds City Council, Metropolitan Police Service, Norwich Union, Transco and Westminster City Council. ESRI (UK) is the sole distributor of ESRI Inc.'s world leading ArcGIS suite of products. For more information on ESRI (UK) please visit the website at www.esriuk.com Visit ESRI and ESRI (UK) at Farnborough 2004 - Hall 2 Stand B15