Thales has revealed at Paris that an expanding partnership of air navigation service providers has launched its Eurocat air traffic control system at the first of five member ANSPs in the group - the Irish Aviation Authority.
By 2014 the other four members of Coopans (co-operation between ANS providers), namely Sweden's LFV, Denmark's Naviair, Austro Control and Croatia Control, will also have gone operational with Eurocat.
The IAA has just gone live with the soon-to-be common Coopans Eurocat system at both its area control centres, Shannon and Dublin.
Thales describes this deployment as "the first operational step paving the way for the cost-efficient introduction of new air traffic management concepts" across the Coopans ATM partnership.
Coopans was originally set up in 2006 between the three Scandinavian partners and Thales. They were joined in 2009 by Austro Control and recently by Croatia Control.
The idea is to enable the medium-sized ANSPs to achieve greater negotiating power and influence with systems suppliers and the Single European Sky SESAR development plan, simultaneously harmonising objectives and achieving economies of scale.
At the end of this year, in co-operation with Airbus, the Coopans partners will be running Europe's first validation of a four-dimensional trajectory flight with a required time of arrival.
The flight, from Stockholm to Copenhagen and Maastricht, will have real-time, two-way datalink-driven connectivity between ground and air, allowing trajectory changes to be uplinked to the aircraft's flight management system and performance information to be downlinked.
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Source: Flight Daily News
