The Story of My Life so Far - Part 107 - Working for CAATS, the Canadian Automated Air Traffic System

This is the story of my life so far: 68 years and counting.
Prequel: A Brief History of my Family in France

The story starts here
Previous episode: Part 106

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Today, October 13^th 2018, I am wearing my CAATS t-shirt. CAATS stands for "Canadian Automated Air Traffic System" and is the software system for air traffic control in Canada and part of the airspace over the Atlantic Ocean.

CAATS was developed originally by Hughes Aircraft of Canada, then Raytheon Systems of Canada, for around 15 years, under contract to Transport Canada, then NAV Canada. NAV Canada has deployed the CAATS system in 2009, and has continued to update CAATS.

I came to British Columbia to work on CAATS, first as a French employee of CR2A, loaned to Hughes Aircraft from February to May 1994, then as an employee of Hughes Aircraft, starting in July 1994.

CAATS is mainly written in the Ada programming language, that I had learned in France working for CR2A.

The CAATS software was structured in five layers, each layers being made of several "subsystems". Each subsystem was composed of several "packages", that are Ada components.

I was the technical lead for layers 1 and 2, that we later described as the "Distributed Virtual Machine". In these two layers, there was nothing that was specific to air traffic management, and it could have been used in many other software systems, but I don't think it ever was.

Because there were not many software engineers in Canada that were familiar with the Ada programming language, and Hughes Aircraft did not want to teach the language to new recruits, the company looked for engineers already knowing Ada around the world. In the DVM team, there were people coming from many countries, including Great Britain, France, Australia and South Africa.
Some of these people came and stayed in Canada, me included, and some came and left when there were no longer working for CAATS.

I have several interesting stories of interactions between myself and engineers from different countries.

Continue to Part 108

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Summary
Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8
Part 9 - Part 10 - Part 11 - Part 12 - Part 13 - Part 14 - Part 15 - Part 16
Part 17 - Part 18 - Part 19 - Part 20 - Part 21 - Part 22 - Part 23 - Part 24
Part 25 - Part 26 - Part 27 - Part 28 - Part 29 - Part 30 - Part 31 - Part 32
Part 33 - Part 34 - Part 35 - Part 36 - Part 37 - Part 38 - Part 39 - Part 40
Part 41 - Part 42 - Part 43 - Part 44 - Part 45 - Part 46 - Part 47 - Part 48
Part 49 - Part 50 - Part 51 - Part 52 - Part 53 - Part 54 - Part 55 - Part 56
Part 57 - Part 58 - Part 59 - Part 60 - Part 61 - Part 62 - Part 63 - Part 64
Part 65 - Part 66 - Part 67 - Part 68 - Part 69 - Part 70 - Part 71 - Part 72
Part 73 - Part 74 - Part 75 - Part 76 - Part 77 - Part 78 - Part 79 - Part 80
Part 81 - Part 82 - Part 83 - Part 84 - Part 85 - Part 86 - Part 87 - Part 88
Part 89 - Part 90 - Part 91 - Part 92 - Part 93 - Part 94 - Part 95 - Part 96
Part 97 - Part 98 - Part 99 - Part 100 - Part 101 - Part 102 - Part 103 - Part 104
Part 105 - Part 106