Eurocontrol's financial incentive includes contributing to the installation costs of VDL-2 equipment on the first 100 aircraft that have it fitted, which includes "pioneer" airlines like Lufthansa, whose Airbus short-haul fleet uses the Link 2000+ core area extensively.
The other incentive, for the pioneers and all others that equip before the mandate, is a 2% reduction in the Eurocontrol-collected route charges. Wandels says this translates to an average €13 ($15) per aircraft trip across Europe. Wandels also admits that, although there will be no policy to give CPDLC-equipped aircraft preferential ATM service, controllers find them so much easier to handle than the others that the result may be an actual advantage in terms of clearances.
Source: Flight International
