Airservices Australia provides air traffic control management services. Each year, Airservices manages air traffic operations for more than three million domestic and international flights carrying some 47 million passengers, and has 1000 air traffic controllers working from two major centres in Melbourne and Brisbane and 26 towers at international and regional airports.

Airservices Australia and the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) both provide air traffic control management services in Australia. The detailed procedures governing these services are contained in a joint Airservices Australia/RAAF document called the Manual of Air Traffic Services (MATS).

MATS is over 1000 pages long, and is available on paper for all air traffic staff across the country. MATS has grown organically over the years, and contains a huge amount of carefully crafted, detailed information. Needless to say, any potential for errors or misunderstandings in MATS is completely unacceptable.

Airservices Australia approached Realisation to review MATS, and we identified a number of potential issues. The document was getting larger and larger, and there was a danger that it might become unwieldy. Updates to MATS were handled by physical page replacement, requiring a large amount of effort for each change. The process for authorisation of changes to MATS was cumbersome, and needed to be streamlined and speeded up. Some of the language used in MATS was too complex, and the layout needed to be rationalised. MATS was published using a proprietary word processor, which tied Airservices Australia to one software vendor for the life of the document. There were a number of other issues with MATS, not least of which was a growing dissatisfaction with the current state of the document by its users.

Realisation undertook a Scoping Study which recommended a complete rewrite of MATS. In undertaking the Scoping Study, Realisation met with dozens of key staff and managers, and canvassed the problems that they saw with the current MATS, and with any project to rewrite it. The results of this study were documented in a detailed report.

The next phase was the redesign of MATS and its publishing environment. Realisation developed a complete set of processes for the rewriting and careful checking of MATS, and a set of processes for the ongoing maintenance of MATS after the rewrite. Realisation also undertook a detailed audience and task analysis, which resulted in a new structure for the content of MATS, and organised usability testing to gain objective evidence for the fitness for purpose of this new structure compared to the existing structure. Realisation also developed a new page layout for MATS, which was usability tested against the existing layout and another candidate, to ensure that the new layout was a significant improvement in terms of readability.

Realisation recommended that Airservices move from their existing proprietary publishing platform, to XML. XML is a vendor-neutral document file format that is supported by multiple tools, and provides significant benefits in terms of single-sourcing (eg for the eventual online publishing of MATS).

As part of the software solution, Realisation developed automated reports which allow Airservices to trace each paragraph of the new MATS from its original position in the old document, through every review and every comment, to its eventual place in the new MATS, and through every single review and change throughout its life. Other reports allow Airservices to track compliance of each part of the document with national and international regulations, and with air traffic controller training materials.

Phil Cohen, Realisation’s MD, said that this was one of the most complex documentation projects ever undertaken in Australia. “There were so many different elements, including legislative compliance, multiple complex audiences, technical requirements and constraints, project management and change management, and complex and ground-breaking software and process development, and of course safety-critical subject matter. But in the end it all came together smoothly, which is a direct result of the amount of planning and consultation involved.”