GERMANY'S civil-aviation authority, the DFS, is working with Lufthansa to carry out trials of free-flight technologies in Europe. "We're looking at how to implement free flight in Germany as soon as possible," says Dr Klaus Dieter Ehrhardt, responsible for CNS/ATM planning in the DFS.
"We will look at the cost benefits as well," he adds. The programme will last three years and include simulations and flight trials on Lufthansa aircraft fitted with VHF data-link equipment. The work will be based largely on existing infrastructure, and will cover ground and airborne systems.
Its Joint Air Navigation Experiment aims to carry out trials on critical traffic densities for free flight, transition from free-flight airspace to controlled airspace, and responsibility sharing between air-traffic controller and pilot.
Ehrhardt holds out the hope that a co-ordinated Europe-wide free-flight trial could be mounted, drawing from existing work being carried out in the Nordic states, France/Switzerland, Italy and central European states. "There is no airspace available under one authority with sufficient area to do free-flight or near-free-flight trials," he says. "We know the classic system cannot cope with the doubling of air-traffic density by 2010, so we must validate CNS/ATM through an intelligent combination of existing components," he points out.
Source: Flight International
