Working to avoid congestion through closer integration of airports into the network

Treviso airport is closed all summer for runway works. An operational procedure has been published and is applicable to general aviation only until 31 October 2011.

The summer closure of the Treviso airport and the steps taken by EUROCONTROL upon request of its partners to mitigate the impact of this closure are a practical example of the many benefits of integrating airport operations and flow management more closely into the European ATM network.

Treviso airport is closed all summer for runway works. An operational procedure has been published and is applicable to general aviation only until 31 October 2011.

Mitigating the impact of the Treviso airport closure through slot coordination

Treviso airport in Italy is closed since the beginning of June until the end of September 2011 due to works on the runway. All air traffic will be operated to/from Venice Marco Polo airport. This was a perfect opportunity to evaluate an operational procedure and possible practical difficulties independently from the current discussions about the implementation of Article 14(1) of the Airport Slot Regulation.

An operational procedure has been published and is applicable to general aviation only until 31 October 2011.

In support of this procedure for Venice, the Italian civil aviation authority, ENAC, delegated the task of monitoring the compliance to airport slots at Venice airport to the Italian ANSP, ENAV, and empowered the latter to suspend non-compliant flights.

If a flight does not have an airport slot, a central network position within ENAV may decide to contact the Network Management Tactical Operations in Brussels and request manual suspension of the flight concerned. The responsibility for identifying individual flights lies entirely with ENAV and ENAC.

Consequently, the Network Management Tactical Operations in Brussels may, on behalf of ENAV, suspend a flight to avoid congestion of traffic at Venice airport in case of flights planned to arrive without an allocated slot. A copy of the suspension message is then submitted to the aircraft operator and the slot co-ordinator so that the situation can be resolved.

Though repeated infringement can also result in financial penalties, as was foreseen by the EC Regulation, but this strict measure was hardly ever applied. The coordination between the concerned parties will normally resolve the situation and aircraft operators finally get a slot from the coordinator to safely operate the flight.

From a more specific Network Manager perspective, the initiative contributes to predictability and stability in the European ATM network, to ensure robust traffic management and enable the optimisation of the available capacity in real-time.

For more information, contact Christian Faber.

Better matching of airport slots and flight plan data

The European Commission requested EUROCONTROL to help in the practical implementation of common rules, described in Article 14 (1) of EC Regulation 793/2004, for the allocation of slots at airports.

One of the main objectives of these rules is to ensure that the principles of transparency, neutrality and non-discrimination are fully adhered to. “An air carrier’s flight plan may be rejected by the competent air traffic management authorities if the air carrier intends to land or take off at a coordinated airport, during the periods for which it is coordinated, without having a slot allocated by the coordinator”, says the regulation.

To support the better allocation of slots at airports, network management operations at EUROCONTROL use an alerting service checking flight plans against airport slots, on top of normal ATFCM measures.

One of the tools they use is called AMON (Airport Slots Monitoring), which has already been used at various occasions, namely the World Cup 2006 in Germany, Le Bourget Air Show, Monaco Grand Prix Formula 1, film festivals and the UEFA EURO 2008. AMON proved to be very useful in dissuading aircraft operators from operating non planned flights to coordinated airports.