EUROCONTROL partners with airlines, airports and ANSPs on European airspace partnership

EUROCONTROL entered (21-Nov-2020) a partnership of airspace users, airlines (coordinated by Air France) airports (coordinated by ACI Europe) and ANSPs, with EUROCONTROL in its role as the European Network Manager. The partners jointly released a set of high level principles to drive and effectively coordinate the modernisation of the European ATM system. The partners have defined the following high level principles:

• Build and make use of an unprecedented pool of civil and military ATM expertise, know-how and skills;
• Simplify the processes to perform the required tasks, better focusing resources and efforts;
• Expand perspectives beyond EU boundaries to support stakeholders across the whole European network;
• Combine a performance based and passenger centric approach with the network perspective;
• Focus on the environmental performance of ATM to support the European 'Green Deal';
• Deliver the highest level of buy in from all involved stakeholders thanks to inclusive stakeholder consultation mechanisms;
• Widen the scope to all major deployment and infrastructure initiatives requiring synchronisation at the pan-European level;
• Establish a closer link between the technology innovation cycle and ATM operations addressing the most urgent priorities and operational needs;
• Defragment deployment and coordinate investments through a reinforced programme management approach;
• Create a "virtuous cycle" to link and de-risk all phases of the ATM lifecycle through close cooperation with the SESAR Joint Undertaking.

The partnership intends to build on the achievements of the SESAR Deployment Manager and SESAR Deployment Alliance and is ready for the future steps in deployment activities in view of the forthcoming call for proposals by the European Commission, covering the term from mid2021 until at least 2027. [more - original PR]