Raytheon has been awarded a contract by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia General Authority of Civil Aviation (GACA) for a nationwide air traffic management system based on cooperative surveillance.

Raytheon will provide air traffic control surveillance throughout the nation, enhance flight safety for the rapidly growing domestic airline sector and improve the efficiency of Saudi Arabia’s air traffic management system.

Saudi Arabia will deploy 21 systems with supporting infrastructure for en-route service and Raytheon will establish a regional maintenance facility in the country to support the systems.

The facility will be used to support current and future systems used in the Middle East for other air navigation service providers.

The acceptance testing of the first system will be completed in November 2009 and will be installed at the GACA training academy to implement the programme as well as continue training.