No Ministry of Defence air system gets airborne without aeronautical information being involved at some point. Whether in the aircraft, or via operational support such as air traffic control, it all comes from the RAF’s No 1 Aeronautical Information Documents Unit
We have one of the very smallest sub-specialisations in the Royal Air Force. I think dental nursing is slightly smaller than us, but not that much,” says Squadron Leader Euan Johnstone. He’s a serving helicopter pilot who is currently second in command at No 1 Aeronautical Information Documents Unit_(No 1 AIDU), where he’s been posted for the past seven years.
The unit provides charts and maps in three dimensions, from the surface of the sea to the edge of space – around 66,000 feet up (more than 20km). “Our upper limit is technically ‘unlimited’, but we don’t map space,” says Euan.
Between 800,000 and a million paper products are provided externally each year and distributed to customers.
“My first boss, pre-pandemic, compared us to the NHS,” adds Euan.
“Ours is an assumed service and free at the point of delivery. Everybody is using our information for air without even consciously recognising that’s what they’re doing. Our current boss is quick to_point out that every named operation that has an aviation asset involved in it today is doing so with our data. So we have a direct impact on Ministry of Defence and RAF operations worldwide. We are integral and little-noticed.”
Based at RAF Northolt since 1953, No 1 AIDU has 103 personnel. Warrant Officer Ken Laurie has been there since he joined the RAF in 1990:
“We are mixture of civilian and military. We also have a small number of Air & Space Ops and cyberspace personnel. But the mainstay of that is we’ve got about 61 cartographers on the unit at the moment.”
Ken joined the RAF as one of those cartographers. “I’ve spent most of_my career here at Northolt. I did manage to_escape to Afghanistan for four months – that was back in 2009 – but I’ve worked through all the sections and made my way from manual through to digital over the years.
“When I started, we were printing the charts. We were actually drawing them manually with pencils, rulers and Douglas navigation protractors; I think I’ve still got mine somewhere.”
A global mission
The unit has a mission to provide timely, relevant and accurate aeronautical information in support of defence objectives. No 1 AIDU compiles and distributes aeronautical information to all MOD aviation assets, as well as its partners across Government and allies worldwide. “We work closely with our partners, and with the US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia – Five Eyes – and we also sell our data to our European counterparts,” says Euan. The unit also provides information for other sections in the UK military services – specifically the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm and the British Army’s Army Air Corps.
“We don’t have any air cartographers working in Space Command. We have very clever people in our profession and I’ve had people discussing it with me – but, of course, when you map in space, you have to map in four dimensions [adding time]. Because unless objects are geostationary, they are not going to be in the same place relative to Earth.”
Billions of pieces of data
Data for the charts comes from worldwide sources, is compiled into products in easy to-read formats and then prepared for external distribution. Increasingly, aeronautical information is needed digitally, so No 1 AIDU also compiles data in formats and images for specific uses; from the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight to the F-35 Lightning squadron. The unit is also involved with the development of Tempest, to ensure the platform gets the right aeronautical information and that No 1 AIDU will be able to portray that in the right way. Euan elaborates: “We don’t know when our aircraft are going to need to go into any specific airfield, so we collate a worldwide data set, drawing on our Five Eyes partners to give us a lot of the rest of our information. For the core European area, we will ingest over 4.5 billion points of data. We create aerodrome booklets, low-flying charts, en-route charts and instrument approach procedures. I always describe instrument approach procedures to the layman as ‘getting off the motorway’. The route you take to get to your driveway, it’s just an approach procedure, right? [Platforms are] not going to fly any differently just because they’re a military aircraft. So we will buy in those for 97 per cent of the procedures in the world. We will make the other three per cent – specifically the procedures for British military airfields and for areas of interest we can’t source for traditional needs. If our aircraft are looking to operate in areas that don’t routinely publish their data, we will try to use whatever back channels we can and we create the product from those.”
Symbols and safety
The symbols used on the charts only change slowly. Ken says: “It’s pretty much the same symbology that we had when I joined up more than 30 years ago. When we get a new bit of controlled airspace and new developments such as wind farms or solar panels, new symbology has to be created. We don’t have identical symbology to NATO, but we do try to follow a similar style. The products we make are NATO-standard products, and we put our own flavour on them.”
New symbols can lead to better quality and safety. Former helicopter pilot Euan says:
“In Europe, they’re very good at identifying suspended cables by placing aerial marker balls on them, so pilots can see them from the cockpit. But we don’t do that in the UK. We have wires strung across the valleys, invisible against the terrain behind it. And I know from personal experience I’ve come very close to hitting them. So, No 1 AIDU worked very closely with the Geospatial Air Information Team, which is part of the Defence Geographic Centre. They compile the vertical obstruction data set – the database that gives a specific code for suspended cables – and we’ve introduced the symbology on our charts. This has led to a massive increase in aircrew reporting suspended cables that are not yet on any aviation maps. People are now seeing that symbol, recognising the importance of it and, when they spot cables they think should be marked, are now reporting. So there’s been a real benefit for everyone.”
The unit works to the Aeronautical Information Regulation and Control (AIRAC) cycle, an internationally mandated schedule that ensures the most up-to-date information is procured and compiled for front-line aircrew and air traffic controllers. It produces updated documents on a continuous 28-day cycle and has never missed a publication deadline. “AIRAC day this year is Christmas Day,” says
Euan. “We’ll have people in on Boxing Day getting the data ready for the next AIRAC day. We never fail to do that. We never stop.” Unique services and products Like many military units, No 1 AIDU has occasionally been on the chopping block. “We’re continually working to ensure that our operational relevance is understood,” says Euan. “Some of the newest aircraft in our fleets are entirely reliant upon our products – not just digital, but paper versions – which is some element of assurance that we are still needed. The value we add on top of a commercial civilian service is quantifiable and it would become a lot more expensive if we were to contract out. We can contract out the design, but physically drawing and producing our procedures would probably cost more than the total cost of the unit including all of the other work that we do.” Many of the unit’s products are commissioned by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and by NATO.
“Again, contracting that out would be expensive because there are no other users of the product except maybe air ambulance,” says Euan. “There are no civilian aircraft operating in the low-flying environment, so to produce a bespoke low-flying chart somebody would have to create it from scratch. The inherent expertise and value for money that No 1 AIDU already offers for defence, is something I continue trying to highlight. And my commanding officer will continue to highlight that every named operation is only being prosecuted because No 1 AIDU has been able to provide timely, accurate, relevant data.”
The future is ‘out there’
“No 1 AIDU is going to continue to provide aeronautical information for as long as it is needed,” says Euan. “Airspace continues to evolve, the way this information is codified and exchanged is continuing to evolve internationally. We’ll probably move away from traditional AIPs [Air Information Packages] into machine-readable data. That’s a code that could be ingested by systems that can then automatically portray those charts. So we need the ability to be able to create that code. We need the ability to be able to ingest and exploit that code. That will hopefully make the processing of data an awful lot quicker, which allows us to do an awful lot more with the same number of staff. We expect to become timelier. We expect to be able to ‘put out’ a greater proportion of the Earth at a greater rate. We expect our timeliness to improve as that technology improves, and we are right on the leading edge there.”
At the time of the interview with Air Mail, the profession had just had a name change. “RAF Recruitment and Selection thought a lot of people don’t understand what a cartographer actually is,” said Euan. “So they went away, looked at us and what we do, and came back with a new name: aviation data analyst. Since that’s happened, recruitment has come on really well.”
Euan adds: “Ken here is one of the last of the real artists we have at No 1 AIDU – but a lot of the work that our cartographers are doing today is data-focused. It might then be represented graphically, but the root of it is the data sets that we’re ingesting, collating and then exploiting.” And last but not least, the unit will continue to look for opportunities for air cartographers at the front line. “They know an awful lot about airspace,” says Euan. “I would go to an air cartographer – or an aviation data analyst, I’m not used to the term yet – if I had a question about airspace. The way they understand how data can be used and manipulated is of massive value to the front line. We have people with Atlas A400M, people with Poseidon P8, people with Typhoon.”
Ken adds: “I want to get the specialisation back to where it was. When I joined up, we had low-flying cells out in Germany and when they closed all the cartographers came back here. Since I took up my role as Unit Warrant Officer, we’ve slowly dug away to get our personnel into these roles on station, where we know they can help. When [Poseidon] P8 was delivered from the United States, we had our contractors at RAF Lossiemouth. In those two weeks, they moved forward the station’s geospatial ingest by months. We want to highlight that there’s the potential that air cartographers can add value on the front line that is currently untapped.”
