Ramp inspections at European Union airports – SAFA
On 27/07/2010, in SKYbrary News, by steve
News from EUROCONTROL’s aviation safety knowledge base SKYbrary.
The European Community Safety Assessment of Foreign Aircraft (SAFA) program began in 1996 as a voluntary ECAC program. Its legal basis was subsequently established by Directive 2004/36/CE of the European Parliament and of the Council of 21 April 2004 – the so-called “SAFA Directive”. Under this legislation, international safety standards have been enforced within the European Community by means of ramp inspections of third-country aircraft landing at airports located in the EU Member States.
Read the full report here.
You can read more about the past, present and future of the SAFA program here.
Smooth cruise – The WizzAir experience
On 17/06/2010, in The lighter side, by heading370
Editor’s note: This article dates from 2007. We are now an economic crisis later but the essence of the story is still the same. What is more, WizzAir, operating 30 aircraft, is still with us and hopefully will remain for a long time to come.
WizzAir, the largest low fare – low cost airline in Central and Eastern Europe launched operations in May 2004. They concentrate primarily on the lucrative markets of the newest EU member states where air travel is going through some really dynamic expansion. This policy has lead to the opening of routes to Eindhoven for example. The company operates these flights from Budapest, Hungary and Katowice in Poland. The author, who is an Air Traffic Controller at the Maastricht Upper Area Control Center (MUAC) was happy to join the crew of the Eindhoven-Budapest-Eindhoven flights at the end of March.
On the ramp at EHEH
Eindhoven is still a relatively quiet airport where the atmosphere is quite relaxed and hassle-free. It is shared by civil and military users the biggest operator – apart from the Koninklijke Luchtmacht (The Royal Air Force of the Netherlands) – is Ryanair. Also Transavia and a few Turkish charter companies fly there regularly and on a typical day the airport handles about 20 arrivals.
After some really helpful co-ordination with the company’s operations control, crew rostering section and the Head of Training, Captain Gabor Lezsovits, I was ready to board HA-LPD, (c/s number 1902) an Airbus A320-200 that operated as WZZ228B.
Click here to read the full article
The tower with a soul… 18.
On 10/06/2010, in The tower with a soul, by lajos
Approaching the present day…
What a strange folk we are, we Hungarians! We complain when we have to work with an obsolete system and when it is replaced with something new, we complain that we are forced to learn new tricks when we had actually grown used to the old ones. This was the situation with the introduction of the MATIAS system that followed Eurocat2000 and whose introduction was anything but smooth. As I heard from “inside”, the new system was simply too complicated for many an experienced colleague and they were actually quite happy to profit from the announced cut in personnel. They retired and my generation had a chance to follow them up in the Supervisor positions. Their place was in turn filled with new hires and those youngsters showed in short order that controlling the terminal area was not such a difficult task after all.
All of a sudden traffic became much more fluid and they turned aircraft on final with a flair never before seen. This was a revelation for us in the tower. Wow, it can be done like this also! We saw the change clearly since watching traffic being handled by the old guard we often shook our heads in amazement, especially when the odd aircraft flew all the way down to the town of Kecskemet for a bit of sightseeing as a result of being cleared for descent and turn to base leg far too late…
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SWIM-SUIT final User Forum – 24-25 June 2010, Rome, Italy
On 01/06/2010, in Events, by steve
System Wide Information Management (SWIM) is one of the mainstays of both SESAR and NextGen. SWIM is the set of institutional arrangements, rules, roles and responsibilities, applications and networks that enable information sharing and the common situational awareness, among others things, that are essential for developing the future net-centric air traffic management system.
SWIM-SUIT, an EU 6th Framework Project, developed a SWIM prototype that provides a basis for assessing the technological solutions used. Although the idea of developing a SWIM prototype may suggest that this was a technology driven project, SWIM-SUIT also addressed the legal and financial aspects of SWIM implementation. Since SWIM is less of a problem from the technological point of view, with most obstacles expected in the institutional area, this latter contribution of SWIM-SUIT will be especially valuable.
SWIM-SUIT will hold its final User Forum in Rome, Italy, on 24-25 June 2010.
You can register here. Registration closes on 4 June!
Seat pitch – a matter for the European Parliament?
On 10/05/2010, in Viewpoint, by cleo
My travel plans were only slightly affected by Iceland’s wayward volcano but I understand some members of the European Parliament and the European Commission were less fortunate. This is good. Hopefully they now have a better appreciation of the value and performance of an industry they are so keen to regulate but which otherwise they tend to take for granted. Kiwi growers from New Zealand to flower tillers in Africa all got a good appreciation of just how important and indispensable aviation really is.
This reminder came just about in time. If the rumors are anything to go by, the new parliament and commission is about to go into one of their regulatory overdrive periods and what better target for something like this than aviation? For some reason aviation is the first that comes to their minds when there is a need to pay for something (see Galileo) or where, in their view, passengers must be protected by big brother (and increasingly big sister).
We all know what EU regulatory zeal can lead to… just think of past attempts to standardize the curvature of bananas and the proposed ban on some French cheeses because of their too high concentration of bacteria (never mind that it is the bacteria that make the cheese in the first place).
Click here to read the full article
Latest edition of SITA’s “Air Traffic Management Highlights” now available
On 25/02/2010, in Bookshelf, by steve
The latest edition of SITA’s newsletter, Air Traffic Management Highlights, dedicated to the ATM community is now available.
In this publication, you will learn more about two major initiatives undertaken by our industry in 2009:
• The Data Link Services Implementation Rule adoption by the European Commission and
• SITA’s selection by EUROCONTROL to deliver the Pan European Network Service (PENS).
This newsletter will also provide you with a high-level overview of the different air traffic management activities that SITA has been involved in recently.
Get your copy here.
Copenflop fall-out – what next?
On 16/02/2010, in Environment - Without hot air, by cleo
The Copenhagen environment conference was supposed to bring solutions to the problems nearer. The conference was a complete flop, certainly in
respect of aviation. Of course, trusting anything this serious to politicians is a bad idea to begin with, but this is the world we live in. We must trust them to get it right every now and again. Copenhagen was not one of their better days… But what will aviation be doing now?
Luckily, we are long past the initial arguments saying that aviation’s part in harmful emissions was so small, it was not even worth talking abut. The contribution is still very small but avoiding talking about it gets few friends for any industry… Aviation has built itself a reputation of environmental consciousness and as a source of innovative solutions, both of which were set as examples to other industries just before the Copenflop. That none of those ideas were used or even considered by the conference is not aviation’s fault….
Click here to read the full article
European Parliament – The terrorists’ best friend?
On 13/02/2010, in Battle stations, by cleo
They have done it again! After condemning full body scanners as being in conflict with human rights, the European Parliament now voted down the so called SWIFT accord, something that would have given US authorities more visibility of the funds being transferred between the world’s banks and hence would have enabled better tracking of the activities of terrorist groups. The European Ministers of Justice had approved the SWIFT accord but this was now killed by the EP. The reason? The privacy of European citizens was not properly protected under the agreement, some euro-parliamentarians claimed.
In case you have forgotten, the European Parliament is the circus that commutes between Strasbourg in France and Brussels in Belgium because European States could not decide where it should actually be headquartered and the members of which are chosen in elections with record low (and decreasing) turnout of European citizens. In 2009 the average turn-out across the Union was just 43 %…
Watching on TV as the good EP members cheered at this latest folly, one was reminded of a bunch of immature school children who had just pulled off a particularly nasty prank.
Click here to read the full article
CANAC2 operational – is there a future for CANAC2?
On 12/02/2010, in Viewpoint, by pbn
February 10 was a day many in Belgium will remember for a long time. Most of the populace for the longest ever traffic jams, 950 kilometers in total, caused by early morning snow bringing chaos to the motorways. For a select few, February 10 will mark CANAC2’s going into live operations. CANAC is Belgium’s cutting edge air traffic control system and its most recent incarnation, representing a 60 million euro investment, puts a host of new, even more advanced functions at Belgian controllers’ fingertips. Surely a cause to celebrate…
But this is not what a number of protesters thought, picketing Belgocontrol’s entrance with slogans that read: “No SABENA bis, no time to celebrate”. What is going on?
Click here to read the full article
Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) – History and current practice
On 09/02/2010, in CDM, by steve
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
The concept of Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) was originally defined in the United States by a group of airlines, led by US Air, in response to what the airlines perceived as inadequate co-operation between airports, the FAA and the airlines themselves. They formed the so called CDM Group, members of which visited several airports with traffic flow problems and analysed the reasons.
Significantly, they discovered that in many cases the reasons were in fact quite trivial. In one case, a missing telephone connection between the FAA tower and the Delta ramp controller was found to be at the root of major departure delays; in another case the “secret” nature of cancelled flights was found to be the cause of unused slots at an otherwise seriously congested airport.
The CDM Group in its original reports had actually established three of the most basic rules of CDM which remain valid to this day even if, unfortunately, in some cases they are being ignored. The three rules are:
• Most problems have simple causes with simple solutions
• Better information sharing eliminates a very large proportion of the problems
• CDM can only be successful if trust is established between the partners as the first step
Although the CDM Group did at first address problems at airports (Atlanta and Philadelphia) when the FAA embraced the concept, they focused on applying it in the en-route environment. This was a natural consequence of the US scene where capacity constraints were present en-route while airports were almost all free flow at the time. Nevertheless, US airports got involved in CDM early as a result of the FAA’s ground-delay concept. The value of information sharing was shown right from the start. Just by being better informed, airlines were able to respond to the restrictions in a much more efficient manner. The initiative in the early 1990s called FAA/Airline Data Exchange (FADE), supported among others by Northwest Airlines, can be seen as the direct forerunner of what evolved into the US CDM project of to-day.
Click here to read the full article
Is being blown up part of my human rights?
On 12/01/2010, in Battle stations, by cleo
It is bad enough that aviation is the target of people hell bent on blowing things up. It is even worse that there are others in pretty high places who will help them… even if unwittingly.
Violating human rights?
There is no point in denying that the aviation security system, including the extensive and supposedly fool-proof US elements, have failed miserably when it allowed a Nigerian guy with explosives in his underpants to board several planes on Christmas day. I can only surmise what his dad is thinking about all this when his noble act of warning the US embassy about his son’s activities went totally unheeded… Will he, or other dad’s in a similar predicament, raise the flag in the future or just shrug their shoulders? But there is worse…
Body imaging technology is a proven tool to discover this kind of plan. True, no scanner will (for now) see explosives tucked in body cavities but that will surely come one day. Or not…
The good ladies and gentlemen of the European Parliament maintain that full body scanning violates EU citizens’ human rights. In some EU states, the problem arises only if “sensitive” body parts are also displayed. Great! So what have the same nice, caring EU persons done to make aviation safer?
They decided that it was not their business!
While in the United States aviation security is seen as an important government task, in Europe security and its related expenditures are thrust squarely onto the shoulders of the flying community. Airline passengers pay through the nose for the privilege of not being blown up while politicians sit back contentedly… Would they be so relaxed if the threat was the same against the underground or the railways? Hardly!
Airline security does not bring votes… passenger rights and emission trading schemes do. So, focusing on the latter, Europe has never bothered to build a comprehensive, effective and cost-efficient security infrastructure for aviation.
Shooting their mouth off about protecting human rights and so eventually blocking the introduction of full body scanning is nothing short of being misguided on the grandest scale possible.
I would dearly like to know whether the MEPs really consider it preferable to be blown to kingdom come in the knowledge that no screener has seen their willy to arresting the one guy who is behind all the mischief. Makes you almost wonder: what is in the parliamentarians’ underpants?
Environment. The Copenflop – Is aviation better off now?
On 27/12/2009, in Environment - Without hot air, by cleo
We all remember how seriously aviation had been preparing for the UN environmental conference held earlier this month in Copenhagen. Led by IATA, the aviation industry arrived with concrete proposals and plans which were seen by several non-aviation experts as templates suitable also for other industries.
Once the conference kicked off, aviation experts must have felt like adults thrown into a kindergarten with a very poor teacher at the helm. Kids shouting all over the place, getting into fights, leaving the playroom when not granted their favorite toys… Those who ventured outside to escape the worst of the circus fared no better. There was another kind of kindergarten out there, albeit with destruction and tear-gas thrown in to increase the fun.
Of course the kids inside were the same politicians who are convinced that electric cars charged from a public utility produce virtually no emissions and also who had promised to shutter nuclear reactors while having no idea how to replace their generating capacity. It was no surprise to see them come together after having brandished the environmental flag at home and then fail to agree on the time of day, let alone actual environmental action.
Click here to read the full article
TITAN Kicks into high gear
On 08/12/2009, in CDM, by steve
After several months of careful preparation, TITAN, a project in the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme, kicked
into high gear on 3 December 2009 when the TITAN Consortium held the kick-off meeting at INECO’s premises in Madrid.
The name TITAN stands for “Turn-round Integration in Trajectory and Network”. The project will analyze the aircraft turn-round process with a view to identifying opportunities for improvements as well as to pinpoint the influence of external actors and processes like passenger flow and baggage handling. The improved turn-round process will be modeled and validated and a decision support tool will be developed suitable for use by different partners, enabling them to manage the turn-round process more efficiently. This will be achieved primarily by providing predictive, common awareness of all the relevant influences, including those coming from the airport land-side.
Click here to read the full article
My FAB my Castle – is there hope for the European air traffic management enterprise?
On 27/11/2009, in Viewpoint, by pbn
I guess from a purely political point of view, criticizing the Functional Airspace Block (FAB) concept is probably not correct. I will not criticize the FABs. What I will do is share a few thoughts with you and also raise a few questions. Who knows, someone may even have the answers.
So what is a FAB? Contrary to what you may have heard, the FAB concept was/is an effort by the European Union to bring some order into the fragmented European ATM scene. That this was not exactly to everyone’s taste was amply evidenced in the time it took to get the first FAB (and subsequent FABs) off the ground. The process stalled a few times and lots of screaming brides had to be dragged to the altar before it was restarted again.
Click here to read the full article
Air accident investigation – is Europe moving?
On 14/11/2009, in Viewpoint, by cleo
If you purchase a WiFi router or other WiFi piece of gear, you expect it to work anywhere in the world. After all, that is what standards are all about. Except for some channels not being available in the US for example, your expectation is correct. If you inspect the specs on the box however, you will find an interesting note, at least if you buy your gear in Europe. The authorized output power is different in France from that in other countries of the Union! Why is this relevant?
Well, in daily practice you will not notice much of this discrepancy but in our little EU there are other examples of this parochial approach to handling things, to the greater glory of our politicians and their efforts to gain popularity even at the expense of public good. European Union public good to be sure.
When we step on board an aircraft, we expect to step out in one piece and becoming a statistic is far from our minds. This is the correct attitude, after all flying is still the safest method of transport and the odds of not getting hurt are all on our side.
Click here to read the full article
Single Sky Committee unanimously supports Aeronautical Data and Information Quality (ADQ) Implementing Rule
On 04/11/2009, in SWIM, by steve
The drive is on to transform Aeronautical Information Services (AIS) into Aeronautical Information Management (AIM). This is needed to set the scene for the introduction of System Wide Information Management (SWIM), the ultimate goal of the activity.
The change from AIS to AIM is primarily the morphing of the traditional, package based aeronautical information system into a data-based one, where users are provided with data to feed their particular applications in the way they need it rather than being fed with pre-cooked packages that do not really satisfy anyone while also being extremely difficult to change when new requirements turn up.
Click here to read the full article
Wake turbulence gone with the wind – the CREDOS project
On 03/11/2009, in Life around runways, by steve
The problem of vortices
There are two kinds of dangerous phenomena behind large aircraft. Jet wash and wingtip vortices. These are the most important components of what is commonly referred to as “wake turbulence”. The intensity of this turbulence depends on a number of factors, among them the mass of the aircraft concerned. Jet-wash is simply the rapidly moving air expelled from a jet engine. While it is extremely turbulent, it dissipates quickly in both time and space.
Wingtip vortices on the other hand are much more stable and can remain in the air longer after the passage of an aircraft. Wingtip vortices represent the primary and most dangerous component of wake turbulence.
The hazards of wake turbulence are particularly significant during the landing and take-off phases of flight. Aircraft are in a configuration that creates the strongest vortices while they are also flying at a low speed and low altitude. This leaves little margin for recovery in the event of flying into wake turbulence.
In daily operations the risk of encountering wake turbulence on approach or take-off and initial climb out is mitigated by increasing the spacing between lighter aircraft and a preceding heavier one. The time or distance based minima prescribed to ensure this spacing (the so called wake turbulence separation minima) are static and are based on a worst case assumption of the persistence time of the vortices. While this practice ensures safety, it also reduces the actual throughput of runways below what would otherwise be achievable.
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Anniversary – The fall of the Berlin Wall
On 01/11/2009, in Anniversaries, by steve
20 year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 2009
Roger-Wilco deals with politics only in as much as it is aero-politics so you may wonder why we would include in our list of anniversaries the fall of the Berlin Wall now 20 years ago on 9 November 1989. As you will see, this momentous event had affected the course of history, the lives of millions and air traffic management itself in ways more than qualifying it for inclusion. But first a little history.
The first cracks
The fall of the Wall actually started some 690 kilometers (383 NM) away on the Western border of Hungary. By early summer in 1989 more than ten
When the iron curtain opened...
thousand East-German tourists were camping in Budapest and near the Austro-Hungarian border, planning never to return to Erich Honecker’s Germany. It was a sign of the times that a few months earlier the Hungarians and the Austrians held and open-border day (the iron curtain was still more or less in place otherwise) and a number of East-Germans, miraculously aware of what was happening, used this chance to walk over to Austria. In spite of forceful protests from East Germany, in August the Hungarians opened their border and allowed the East-Germans to leave if they wanted to. More then 13000 left in the first mass-exodus of East Germans since the erection of the Wall in 1961.
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A short (unofficial) history of air/ground digital link – 3
On 24/10/2009, in Buzzwords explained, by steve
Pioneers to the rescue
In spite of the positive business case, airspace users were not exactly rushing to equip with air/ground digital link. Because of the slow down of traffic growth in the wake of 9/11, the expected ACARS problems did not materialize and the ATC frequency congestion was also pushed far into the future. In other industries, such a period of respite might have been used to prepare for the times when business recovery would once again make air//ground digital link essential. But that is not how aviation works. With the immediate threat receding and even some of the big carriers fighting for survival, enthusiasm for investing in things that would generate benefits only many years down the road cooled.
Of course for the planners of the ATM system this was a situation that spelled trouble for later. The frequency congestion problems were not a mirage even if for the time being those problems slipped into the future. The need to put together a comprehensive kit of capacity enablers had not become less important, only the urgency had changed somewhat. For LINK2000+ the big question was: how to jump start equipage? The question was not self serving at all. If Maastricht UAC controllers did not get digital link equipped aircraft to work with, it would be impossible to build and maintain proficiency and to shake down the system in real operational circumstances.
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