European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation

Date 12.06.2015
FRA stands for Free Route Airspace, a key priority for the Network Manager.
 
Since 2008, EUROCONTROL has been coordinating the development and implementation of FRA through a cooperative partnership approach involving civil and military experts in airspace design, ECAC member states, air navigation service providers (ANSPs), airspace users, flight planner organisations and relevant international bodies.

The Network Manager sees FRA as making a major contribution towards overcoming efficiency, capacity and environmental challenges, as well as an intermediate step on the road to SESAR business trajectories and 4D profiles.  By the end of 2014, almost half of the 64 European ACCs had implemented various steps of Free Route operations, reducing flying distances by approximately 7.5 million nautical miles – that’s 45,000 tons of fuel saved, reduced emissions of 150,000 tons, and €37 million in savings.

The EUROCONTROL Experimental Centre (EEC) in Brétigny, near Paris, plays a major part in driving airspace design, and in particular FRA, forward through our world-class simulation and validation facilities, where we regularly host ANSPs, individually or collectively, keen to conduct fast-time simulation evaluations of workload and capacity, or run large-scale real-time simulations (RTS).

The latest successful RTS was with AVINOR, the Norwegian ANSP, when we conducted an RTS over a two-week period in January 2015, enabling them to complete their validation activities and confirm that they are ready to implement FRA in Norway.

As a partner of both NEFAB (North European Functional Airspace Block) and NEFRA (North European Free Route Airspace Programme), AVINOR needed to ensure implementation readiness complied with the relevant Concept of Operations and Network Plans agreed by all partners.

Contributing to the success of the RTS, the NM Simulations Team partnered AVINOR in their preparation and conduct of validation activities, ensuring best practice by applying a multi-disciplinary expert team approach: technical preparation (simulation platform and HMI); operational support (environmental data and traffic sample development) and validation expertise (e-OCVM alignment).

Analysis and assessment concentrated on three principal areas:

  1. Safety
  2. Airspace Design
  3. Operational Acceptability

“The RTS activities conducted with EUROCONTROL allows us to go forward with confidence towards implementation (planned to start in October 2015), it has permitted us to satisfy safety requirements and fine-tune our airspace design, our sector realignment proposals and our rules and regulations. We have identified specific training areas in preparation for implementation and requirements for ATC system support tools enhancement for the immediate and medium-term future.” explained Helge Bjertnaes, FRA Project Manager (AVINOR).

“The RTS was realistic and convincing; it created ATCO understanding and buy-in. Our thanks to the EEC team who were very professional, flexible and reactive to our needs” said Kjetil Berakvam, AFRA Core Team Leader (AVINOR).