After a long and painful gestation, the Single European Sky (SES) was born in Rome on 6 May. Nearly 500 people from the industrial and institutional partners in the SESAR consortium gathered in the Eternal City at the SESAR master plan stakeholder forum to celebrate the transition from the project's intense two-year definition phase into the development phase.
The transition was signalled by the formal delivery of the two final documents that wrap up the definition phase: the SESAR master plan (see diagram) and the work programme for the infant project's first five years of working life. All the phases beyond 2013 require further research and development, but the objectives have been agreed. A primary one, not listed in the master plan chart because it is not operational, is to halve the cost of providing air traffic management and pass the benefit on to system users.
The master plan envisages a timescale from now to 2025 during which all the air navigation service providers (ANSP) and airports in Europe will advance at the same rate using the same routemap. The chart is divided up into performance objectives defined as ATM service levels (SL), from SL zero today, to SL five, which will become operational in 2025. The objectives for each SL are laid out in operational performance terms, with time built in for R&D to test the technological and human means by which they can be achieved.
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The complexity of the project is mindblowing, and its dependence on political approval of institutional change and funding at national level across all the European Union Eurocontrol states makes it vulnerable to upset and delay. In one of the opening addresses, the UK Civil Aviation Authority chairman Sir Roy McNulty pointed out that the work done so far was the easy bit. "Now we must make it happen," he said, warning: "We need effective mechanisms for regulatory and state involvement."
Concern about governance issues was on everybody's minds at the forum, dampening enthusiasm and optimism at what was intended to be the celebration of a major achievement. McNulty said that what is needed to achieve this complex project is a level of co-operation that is unprecedented in Europe, encompassing collaboration at the technological, industrial, institutional, and national government levels.
A huge amount of faith is being placed in the "second package" of SES legislation for which the European Commission is drawing up the final draft. Eurocontrol's Paul Bosman, seconded to direct the agency's SESAR master plan team, says the second package is, above all, designed to rectify the failure of the founding legislation to embody its most critical component - a compulsion for ANSPs to meet performance targets.
According to the EC's head of ATM, Luc Tytgat, the draft package will be ready in time for the Council of Transport Ministers' meeting in early June, and it will be about 2010 before it has competed all its processes and becomes European law. He says it sets up the institutional framework that will allow the development phase to work.
Meanwhile, funding is a worry. The EC and Eurocontrol will contribute to the cost of the SESAR consortium's development phase successor, the SESAR Joint Undertaking, again a combination of the agencies and all the stakeholders.
Patrick Ky, head of the EC's team leading the SESAR Joint Undertaking says the body will have a permanent finance director "who will assist all parties in finding funding". Some EU and Eurocontrol money will be available for R&D work and for "crossborder projects", according to Tytgat, but it will not come close to covering the total needed.
Air France's Jean-Marc Bara, speaking on behalf of the system users, says carrying out the required system upgrade work planned for SLs 2 and 3 will demand an investment of about € 17 billion ($26.3 billion), most of which will have to come from ANSPs - almost all of them government owned - and industry.
The precise technological means, and therefore the cost of moving beyond SL 3 to SL 5, is not yet quantified. At this stage no-one seems confident the money will be there across all of Europe, and lack of investment would halt all advance.
An area that was not defined as a SESAR definition phase responsibility, and which is absent from the master plan chart, is the provision of adequate runway capacity in Europe, because that is a local/national planning issue over which the EC has no power. Because a shortage of runway capacity would render major investments in airspace capacity pointless, the SESAR team lists it as a consideration, but then has to place its faith in the airports' motivation as full partners in the SESAR project, and in states' willingness to confer planning permission for airport expansion.
About 30 major airports in Europe are considered capacity constrained, and these are the ones that handle 70% of all the continent's traffic. Like ANSPs, the majority of European airports and airport groups are state or municipally owned, so finding money for investment is a problem.
Roger Cato, chairman of the airports' consortium on the SESAR team, says the runways issue has not been forgotten. He points out that studies at a national level around Europe list a total of 23 potential additional runways that are up for consideration.
But runways and terminals are not all that airports will have to invest in to take their place fully in the SES project. It is essential that aircraft time spent on the ground and in terminal manoeuvring areas during arrivals and departures at airports is minimised, so they will have to invest fully in projects like SWIM - the system-wide information system that will integrate them into the envisaged network-centric system. SWIM is intended to be the central nervous system for the whole seamless organisation that will be essential for an efficient SES, and it should start to become operational in its early form for the SL 2 phase by about 2013.
Funding of about € 1.4 billion will be available from the EC and Eurocontrol to cover the cost of participation in the SESAR Joint Undertaking and for R&D into enabling technologies, with another € 700 million investment expected to be made by equipment suppliers. But that is that is to be shared by all players, not just airports.
Eurocontrol's Bosman hopes states will play their part, not only because of pressure from the second package legislation, but because of the harm to their economies if the system does not deliver. He says that by 2020 air transport's "direct, indirect and induced" contribution to the EU gross domestic product should be € 470 billion.
Source: Flight International
