Representatives from the FAA and the SESAR JU and its members met to discuss commonality, and potential for interoperability between future SWIM environments.

The discussion, held on 9 and 10 December 2009, was focussed on achieving a collaborative plan of activities that would take place between the FAA (NextGen) and SESAR on this subject in 2010/11. The collaboration would come under a new aviation research agreement between the EU and US (FAA), currently under negotiation.

On the first day of the meeting, both sides presented their understanding of the SWIM concept and current roadmaps. On this basis a significant number of commonalities between the approaches were identified as well as some differences.

The second day was dedicated to finding areas where close collaboration will best harmonise NextGen and SESAR and where cooperative efforts will provide the most benefits to aviation stakeholders. These areas for collaboration were then prioritised and a list of tasks was created.

All participants stressed the importance of ensuring compatibility between EU and US SWIM, as well as the importance for other countries to be able to benefit from the work done in the two corresponding programmes. Both FAA and SESAR JU highlighted the need of keeping the world-wide ATM community up-to-date on the progress.