Traffic Management Company Fintraffic Boosts Aeronautical Chart Production with ArcGIS Aviation Charting and ArcGIS Pro

Finland, known as the Land of a Thousand Lakes, is a northern European nation with lush forests, striking scenery, and Europe’s largest lake district. With a highly industrialized economy and bustling tourism industry, travel by air, road, and rail is high; a total of 15.3 million people passed through the Helsinki Airport in 2023. Fintraffic is a special assignment group tasked with ensuring safe travel for residents and visitors alike.

Fintraffic provides and develops traffic control and management services for land, sea, and air by offering intelligent traffic control services, digital services for companies and consumers, and up-to-date traffic information for the public. The Air Navigation Services department of Fintraffic manages Finland’s airspace and provides air route services and air navigation services across the nation’s airspace, including to 22 of its airports.

Adherence to aviation laws and regulations is a critical part of this work, and updating aviation charts for commercial and private pilots and crew is an essential component. To manage and edit charts, Fintraffic uses ArcGIS Aviation Charting, a chart production system that generates navigational products that are compliant with International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Annex 4 and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) standards.

Charts must be updated on a 28-day cycle in accordance with the Aeronautical Information Regulation and Control (AIRAC) schedule. According to Elsi Koho, senior Aeronautical Information Service (AIS) specialist at Fintraffic, the tools in ArcGIS Aviation Charting help Fintraffic comply with regulatory requirements related to aviation charting. “Compliance with regulatory requirements is necessary to ensure safety in aviation,” says Koho.

The tools in ArcGIS Aviation Charting, like Import AIXM 5.1 Message, enable users to work with various aviation data standards, including AIXM (Aeronautical Information Exchange Model). AIXM is an established information exchange format in aviation, and importing data in this format is the first step in the creation of an aeronautical chart with ArcGIS Aviation Charting.

To accelerate deployment, ArcGIS Aviation Charting includes chart templates that are composed of business rules, styles, symbols, and project files conforming to ICAO Annex 4 standards for a complete data-driven charting approach.

A standard workflow for updating an aviation chart includes generating and updating cartographic features and annotations; change detection and reporting; performing cartographic editing and quality control; and exporting the chart product as a PDF file or printed chart.

With the upcoming March 2026 retirement of ArcMap, Esri’s desktop mapping and spatial data analysis application, the Fintraffic team began the transition to ArcGIS Pro to take advantage of updates and improved capabilities, such as a modern user experience and 64-bit processing. Additionally, ArcGIS Pro positions Fintraffic to take advantage of the web GIS pattern for the dissemination of aeronautical information to the aviation community. ArcGIS Pro is the premier desktop geographic information system (GIS) application from Esri. 

Fintraffic began the transition to ArcGIS Pro in 2023 with the production of four different charts. The team leveraged ArcGIS Aviation Charting: Transition Guide to ArcGIS Pro, an Esri technical paper, to get started. They also received assistance from Esri’s Aviation Charting team, who assisted with deploying the ArcGIS Pro template and provided guidance for the different steps of the migration.

“We’re also grateful that part of the Aviation [Charting] team was able to visit us at Fintraffic during the transition process to help with pending issues,” says Koho.

For example, the Aviation Charting team assisted with creating an ArcGIS Pro project template for the ICAO 1:500 000 Aeronautical Chart for Southern Finland. This also helped them adopt Arcade scripts that were needed to symbolize their symbology and annotations.

Koho adds that the Fintraffic team used a workshop approach throughout the whole transition project to study new features of ArcGIS Pro and develop new symbology and annotation, as well as adopt the symbology in ArcGIS Pro, and create workflows for producing the charts.

“We were able to maintain the visual appearance of the end products between ArcMap and ArcGIS Pro,” explains Koho.

The first charts produced with ArcGIS Pro were published in 2024. Ainokaisa Tarnanen, GIS manager at Fintraffic, says they migrated four different chart product types: ICAO 1:500 000 aeronautical charts, enroute chart, index charts, and Local TRA charts.

The use of ArcGIS Pro for the editing and management of aviation charts has streamlined Fintraffic’s production process, simplifying and automating tasks. Katri Eerola, a Fintraffic data management specialist, says that ArcGIS Pro has made it easier to compare data changes between AIRAC updates with the Report Aviation Chart Changes tool. This tool compares features between two enterprise geodatabase versions and returns the differences in a report. 

According to Mira Kajo, GIS specialist at Fintraffic, ArcGIS Pro gives Fintraffic the ability to process larger quantities of data and has improved performance. Koho adds that updating charts is now simpler because the data and symbology of the charts loads faster.

ArcGIS Pro has also allowed Fintraffic to automate some tasks in relation to chart production. Kajo explains that implementing attribute rules and the automatic creation of annotation features has been beneficial and made the chart production process more efficient.

For testing and debugging, the ArcGIS Pro interface and tools like the Arcade playground enable users to better troubleshoot an expression. The ArcGIS Pro interface also provides a more robust integrated development environment (IDE) for creating and updating charts.

“Creating, updating, [and] testing . . . symbology and annotations with Arcade has been easier,” says Kajo.

Data quality has improved with ArcGIS Pro. Koho notes that Fintraffic has been able to move towards a more datacentric approach to aviation charting. For example, she says that there is now less manual editing with the Report Aviation Chart Changes tool, which reduces the chances for human-induced errors and saves time.

This tool compares feature classes in two enterprise geodatabase versions and returns the differences in a report. As the numerical values on the charts come straight from the database, they don’t have to manually add or update them in every chart.

“ArcGIS Pro has also made it easier to compare data changes between AIRAC updates and to make sure that the updated data is correct,” says Koho.

Tarnanen says staff and managers at Fintraffic have been pleased with the end products, and the team plans to expand the use of ArcGIS Aviation Charting and ArcGIS Pro. In addition to the four chart types already migrated to ArcGIS Pro, Fintraffic has migrated visual approach charts for over 20 airports from CAD software.

Fintraffic is also planning to migrate aeronautical obstacle charts and area charts to ArcGIS Pro as a next step in their modernization. As ArcGIS Pro makes it possible for Fintraffic to produce their charts from a centralized database, all charts can also be updated from this database, helping improve accuracy. Koho says it also enables the team to better coordinate the integrity of their products, such as charts and datasets.

“ArcGIS Pro has a variety of tools and possibilities for chart visualization to produce the desired chart products,” says Koho.