About the exercise

This exercise explained airborne spacing manoeuvres to fine-tune the sequencing of the arrival traffic towards the airport. The exercise ran on aircraft simulators in Toulouse and Rome.

Results

The exercise results suggested that the introduction of Airborne Spacing (ASPA) manoeuvres do not negatively affect the predictability of aircraft trajectory  and current safety levels. Feedback from pilots indicates that ASPA operations are well integrated in current flight crew tasks. Significant progress was made on the definition of ASPA-specific radio phraseology messages, and on how these can be combined with Controller Pilot DataLink

Communications (CPDLC) messages for ASPA operations, although more work is needed in both areas in future validation activities.