SESAR yearly Project Awards ceremony took place on February 11th at World ATM Congress in Madrid.

This year’s third SESAR Project Awards recognised projects that delivered exemplary performance in three categories:

• Best in Class, designed to highlight the project complying best with performance indicators such as being on-time, within budget and managing risk assessment;
• Outstanding Project for the projects with the most remarkable deliverables, and the most tangible results aligned with the SESAR strategic objectives; and
• Best Release Exercise for exercises providing superior contribution to Release 2 through quality of the organisation, respect of planning, validation close to operation and concept coverage.

In total, 25 projects and exercises were nominated by SESAR Work Package leaders.

For the ‘Best in Class’ award, the jury selected the ADS-B In/Out for military aircraft project led by Alenia Aermacchi as clear winner, for its capacity to "create a solid basis for the achievement of planned validations and for fully integrating with other military related projects".

In the ‘Outstanding Project’ category, the award went to the Flexible and Dynamic Use of Wake Vortex Separations led by EUROCONTROL, which was commended for “performing well beyond its scope with the potential to impact significantly Air Traffic Control in Europe and worldwide through the implementation of Time Based Separation for final approach”.

Finally ‘Best Release exercise’ was unanimously awarded to exercise 198 supported by P05.06.06, P09.05 and P10.03.02 Airborne SPAcing Sequencing and Merging led by ENAV, Airbus and Selex ES as it performed “the most representative live evaluations done up to now for the ASPA application”.

This year’s awards jury comprised Patrick Ky and Florian Guillermet of SESAR Joint Undertaking, Ramon Tarrech of INDRA and Patrick Schuster of Airbus. The jury congratulates the project leaders and their teams for the outstanding work done in the past year.