Improving the monitoring and position tracking of aircraft while in remote or oceanic areas is the aim of the Oceanic Position Tracking Improvement & Monitoring (OPTIMI) project. After the assessment of the current situation and sets of in-flight demonstrations involving commercial flights in three different Atlantic oceanic regions (NAT, EUR and AFI), the Consortium responsible for the project now delivered their report to the SESAR Joint Undertaking with recommendations in four main areas:

• Technology: to encourage the equipage and use of Future Air Navigation System products (FANS 1/A) for Oceanic Area Control Centres and aircraft flying oceanic areas; this will cover in particular ADS-C and Controller Pilot Data Link Communications (CPDLC);
• Procedures: to transmit automatically every 15 minutes the aircraft position and to trigger automatic transmission of position when a deviation from the planned route is detected; 
• Economic: to optimise the cost of the communications for ATC purposes in the oceanic areas along the service provision chain;
• Policy/ regulatory: rescue and area control centres to jointly develop protocols for notifications and interventions in emergency situations.

The Consortium recommended also to further develop the technologies and procedures for the downloading of aircraft safety critical data to the ground on an event-triggered basis, together with the possibility of creating a Central Repository to manage this information. The SAT-OPTIMI project will be dealing with these topics during the next three months.