The air navigation service providers of Europe's nine northernmost states are starting the process of defining a formal alliance.
The states involved - Iceland, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Denmark, Ireland and UK - are setting up a new executive management team to prepare the legal and financial ground to enable specific joint ventures. The alliance - possibly to be named Borealis - hopes to achieve greater operational efficiency and lower costs across their common airspace.
Norwegian ANSP Avinor explains that an initial alliance structure, with the temporary name of Borealis, will be established by June 2011 with the appointment of an executive management team. They will develop "candidate joint ventures" and associated formal agreements to "accelerate the benefits of closer harmonisation".
Recently Norway, Finland, Estonia and Latvia, working closely with Iceland, have agreed to concentrate on gaining formal functional airspace block (FAB) status under the name NEFAB; whilst Denmark, Sweden, UK and Ireland have signed a memorandum of understanding to explore specific efficiencies in their area. A further MoU is being prepared to link these two developments.
In a joint statement, the CEOs of the nine ANSPs said: "We have a great opportunity to carry forward our lessons from running the only two FABs currently recognised under SES and the experience gained by Sweden and Denmark in forming a joint company to manage their operations. We have identified exciting opportunities and practical ways to drive efficiency across our airspace, whilst drawing our three FABs closer to possible eventual integration."
Three years ago the then-new Eurocontrol director general David McMillan predicted a network-centric cooperation of ANSPs as being the way things are actually progressing, rather than the original concept of creating pure FABs which take no account of borders. A couple of weeks ago Richard Deakin, the chief executive of UK NATS - one of the Borealis partners - suggested that alliances would produce many of the benefits embodied in the FAB concept with fewer of the political and legal difficulties.
Source: Flight International
