Europe plans to adopt a centralised alarm system for ensuring that aircraft or airlines banned by any European Civil Aviation Conference (ECAC) state can be prevented from entering the continent's airspace, Eurocontrol has announced.
The search for a system for making a single-state ban into a pan-European one was accelerated following the discovery, after the January 2004 Flash Airlines crash at Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, that Switzerland had banned the carrier but not relayed the information to the other 41 ECAC states. More than 100 French passengers were killed in the accident.
The system will work through the ECAC-wide safety assessment of foreign aircraft (SAFA) programme. Inspections of aircraft by national aviation authorities (NAA) under the SAFA scheme can result in the banning of a particular airframe, and can extend to an entire airline or even all aircraft registered in a particular state. A co-operation agreement just signed between ECAC and Eurocontrol ensures that registration details of any aircraft affected by a SAFA ban are notified to Eurocontrol's central flow management unit (CFMU). When a flight plan into Europe for a banned aircraft is filed, the CFMU computer recognises it, raises an alert, and notifies the NAA of the intended destination country. This would enable the NAA, if it saw fit, to advise the originating country's aviation authority not to allow it to take off for Europe.
ECAC president Laszlo Kiss says that the new alert system will begin its test phase in "summer 2005". He says: "Following the accident at Sharm el Sheikh it became clear there was a need to disseminate much more proactively the information collected by the SAFA programme about aircraft and operators under operating restrictions."
DAVID LEARMOUNT/LONDON
Source: Flight International
