SESAR Members, ENAIRE and DSNA, have successfully demonstrated a cross-border solution that enables better coordination of air traffic between the two countries and helps to reduce air traffic flow management (ATFM) delays. The exercise brought together operational staff from Bordeaux and Madrid Area Control Centres as part of the Network Collaborative Management (NCM – PJ.24) Project, as well as staff from Iberia, Air Nostrum, Air Europa, Iberia Express.

Over the course of 2017 and 2018, the project partners tested the use of a collaborative advanced planning (CAP) tool to better coordinate flight level capping short-term ATFCM Measures (STAM) and pave the way for increasing synchronisation with the Network Manager.

This local Network Performance solution enables local flow managers and airlines to offload congested sectors by proposing alternative trajectory options for flights in the short-term planning phase. The solution is part of the toolbox to balance demand and capacity. The demonstration showed that the solution helped to better distribute traffic among sectors and increase Network predictability: for instance, potential ATFCM delays on a single traffic flow was reduced by 4,111 minutes last summer).

The easy-to-use solution also improved situational awareness between control centres and communications with the airlines, while also reducing the time it takes for flow managers to monitor, analyse, coordinate and implement measures.

These latest activities pave the way towards a more standardised and wider cross-border collaborative process, where route proposals could be supported by B2B services supplied by the Network Manager.

Read full summary of demonstrations 

More about the project:

http://www.eurocontrol.int/articles/network-collaborative-management-sesar-2020-project-pj24

http://www.sesarju.eu/projects/ncm

This project PJ.24 has received funding from the SESAR Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 733021