Romeo5 is a digital assistant for approach and tower, based on the robust Victor5 platform.
Romeo5 is ready to be used as a Flight Information Display System for airports with Airport Flight Information Service or as a fall-back, totally independent contingency mitigation system for airport with ATC service. Romeo5 features a full radar-like interface designed for airport and approach, with labels including ground speed, QNH correction, speed vector and trailing position showing the last 5 historical positions. A lower bar allows for a 3NM “halo” and an altitude filter.
Romeo5 can be configured to consume ADS-B data from a local antenna or any other source of surveillance, like radar or MLAT data feeds. Romeo5, based on the Victor5 platform architecture, focuses on reliability, scalability, and maintainability, enabling the deployment of highly redundant data services that reside simultaneously on on-premises equipment and edge or cloud resources. The platform leverages cutting-edge information technologies and is built on a solid data strategy that is ready for Artificial Intelligence (AI) developments.
Romeo5 assists the approach operational room with a portable device that meets the following requirements:
Victor5, when paired with high-quality data is capable of supporting operational personnel with a dependable, powerful system to guarantee not only safety “to clear the skies” but also the continuation of the service (likely under a pre-defined degraded mode) even in situations where the operating room needs to be vacated or radar surveillance data is unavailable.
Romeo5 can run on any modern computing equipment and only requires a last-generation web browser to display its high-end interface. When paired with a powerful device like the latest iPad Pro, Victor5 excels in performance, display quality, touch-based interactivity, and connectivity to up to a 6K external monitor, making it an incredible solution for contingency situations. Other configurations, including a local multi-server and multi-client are easily configurable.
As a FIDs for Airport Flight Information Service, Romeo5 is designed with the highest safety and comfort standards. Similar to modern ATC consoles, it displays the target with position linked to its label, which includes callsign, flight level, selected flight level from mode-S (if available through the surveillance data feed), ground speed, and QNH correction. A 1-minute speed vector completes the target information. A lower bar is accessible via an external mouse, but it can also be tapped directly when using a touch screen. This bar includes zoom in/out (“pinch to zoom” gesture available on a touch screen), flight level filters, and tools to measure distance on a traffic on approach.
In terms of regulation, Romeo5’s data platform follows the UK CAA CAP670 standards for Flight Information Display systems.
As a situational awareness device or for use as a planning tool, Romeo5 can be configured with a variety of UI colours to ensure following any required human factors guidelines.
We deliver our applications with the latest web technologies. and our core is developed in React-Redux, the type safety of TypeScript and the SSR framework of Nextjs. We like to style with CSS-in-JS solutions, like styled-components. Our backends are polyglots, Go, Python and Node. We are now experimenting with Rust and Web Assembly to speed up our hot paths and deliver the best possible performance. We have a fully automated CI/CD pipeline and follow the best DevOps practices, implementing reviews, linting and automated testing. As a small team, we follow a flexible kanban-based methodology. We work on GitHub and love anything that makes our lives easier as developers, e.g., GitHub’s co-pilot.
Our multi-environment cloud infrastructure hosted in Azure is based on micro-services deployed on Docker containers. This allows us to scale our software components in a flexible, resilient and automated way through Kubernetes clusters. We rely on Spark clusters processing, supported by Databricks, to read incoming data either historical coming from our data lakehouse (Parquet & Delta Lake), or via streaming (Kafka).