DAVID LEARMOUNT / LONDON
If Europe is to have a unified air traffic management system, standardisation by all ATM service providers is critical
Although final political clearance for the single European sky (SES) was only achieved at the end of 2003, preparations for it have effectively been under way for several years. Harmonisation of differing national systems, equipment and safety standards was always going to be needed for efficiency and capacity reasons whether or not the SES got the green light.
The SES will mean many things: airspace sectors designed with efficiency rather than national borders in mind; convergence and interoperability of air traffic control centres' software and hardware, creating an integrated network rather than a series of adjacent but separate systems; and agreed policies on ATC communications datalinking and surveillance systems capability. Eurocontrol has also taken on the task of driving ATM service providers towards a convergence of safety standards, and designing a system for assessing the standards and monitoring them. Many countries did not even have such a system within their own national ATM service: the collection and monitoring of pan-European statistics had never been carried out. Now it has begun under the auspices of Eurocontrol's safety regulation commission (SRC), which brings in commissioners from most participating states.
Air traffic control is concerned primarily with aircraft separation and safety. Most passengers think it is an air traffic controller's only task. Air traffic management (ATM) - the real work faced by European controllers and planners - is ATC with traffic flow management as an added assignment. It is more of a strategic art, and its objective - beyond safety - is to increase system capacity and reduce flight times. ATM, therefore, represents multiple challenges that are inevitable in a busy modern system.
Peter Stastny, head of Eurocontrol's safety regulation unit (SRU), points out that most of the building blocks for the safety system are already in place. These are the ESARRs (Eurocontrol safety regulatory requirements), which define minimum standards and provide details of how the standards are to be met, measured and monitored - and the deadlines by which full compliance is required.
The requirements have been based, says Stastny, on a combination of established best practices, plus the identified requirement to meet foreseeable future challenges with a unified safety approach within the SES. There will be seven ESARRs, defining everything from the regulatory framework and how it will be policed, to ATM personnel assessment, qualification, training and licensing.
Uneven adoption
But according to the 2003 SRC annual safety report, the ESARRs are not being implemented at the same rate across Europe. All 42 member nations in the European Civil Aviation Conference (ECAC) are committed to adopting Eurocontrol's standards, so the job is a large one. The SRU has, over the last three years, been advancing the process by holding "ESARRs awareness workshops" for national regulators and air traffic service providers.
For example, ESARR 2 - which has been published - lays down the procedures for measuring ATM safety, and for reporting "safety occurrences". Some early results of this reporting are providing sketchy outlines of the first real picture Europe has seen of how its ATM system performs in safety terms. In effect, ESARR 2 is holding up a mirror to Europe's ATM service providers, and there is evidence that - in the early days - they may not like what they see.
The annual report says: "Due to a lack of wide-scale implementation of ESARR 2, the SRC cannot yet develop comprehensive conclusions on current achieved ATM safety levels. However, high numbers or increasing trends with regard to a number of specific ATM occurrences have confirmed that [the following categories of event] should be classified as 'key risk areas' and as such should be further analysed and/or acted upon." These include collisions on the ground; near controlled flight into terrain (CFIT); unauthorised penetration of airspace; incidents involving mixed operational air traffic and general air traffic; and, "to a lesser degree", level busts (incidents in which the pilot unintentionally climbs or descends through a cleared height).
Stastny warns that as the service providers become more accustomed to the reporting and information sharing system - and learn to trust it - there will be increasing numbers of reports. The 2003 annual safety review, for example, reveals "a small year-on-year increase" in reported events. This may look bad, but until the system settles down and medians can be established for event categories, it will be difficult to assess performance trends.
Meanwhile, the SRU observes that "further work" to encourage reporting and information sharing is needed. The SRU provides participating states with a toolkit for occurrence investigation designed to ensure consistency in event definitions and categorisation. To enable the SRU to be consistent in assessing all the data it assembles it has also developed an annual summary template.
So all the tools are in place, and although reporting is not as well established as the SRU would like, it is already able to provide data that allows some priorities to be set. Until now, Eurocontrol has complained that its efforts to prioritise safety action have been hamstrung by the inadequacy of most national ATM provider reporting systems and a total lack of centralised safety information sharing. The SRC annual report, however, states that eight countries have failed to meet the ESARR 2 implementation deadline.
Law compliance
ESARR 3 defines the requirement for all service providers to have an ATM safety management system. The SEC reports that only four states previously had one, and compliance now is low. ESARR 4 lays down risk assessment and hazard identification system requirements. ESARR 5 is about people and licences, and has been extended to include engineering and maintenance personnel "that have operational safety related duties" as well as controllers. The European Union wants there to be a single European air traffic controller licence, for example, just as it already has a European pilot's licence. Stastny points out that, while the EU is also concerned with social and economic issues such as the mobility of controller labour that a single licence would provide, the SRU is only concerned with establishing a common core content for controller training, defining the minimum competencies controllers must have, and setting the requirements for assessment regimes.
It is quite difficult for an outsider to identify the boundary between Eurocontrol's task in its planning and managing mode - driving the whole continent towards the SES goal - and the task of the SRC, which is to police the system's safety standards. Stastny says the SEC's job is to make an assessment of a safety-related need, and if that requires changed procedures or new or better equipment it will advance a rulemaking proposal. For equipment this would normally involve SEC decisions on a need for safety-net systems like the aircraft collision avoidance systems (ACAS), short term conflict alert (STCA), minimum safe altitude warning systems (MSAWS) and area proximity warning, he explains, and may result from information gathered under ESARR 2 reporting or from lessons learned from an accident. The introduction of a new procedure like reduced vertical separation minima would not be an SEC or SRU initiative, but it would be the SRU's job to monitor its safety before and after implementation.
Eurocontrol's agreed standards are not actual EU law - yet - but all member states are bound by the Eurocontrol Convention, so its regulations have more teeth than the old Joint Aviation Authorities requirements did before the new European Aviation Safety Agency gained its regulatory powers. But any EU state thinking it can take a lax approach to Eurocontrol's requirements will not be able to get away with it for long: the European Commission's already cleared programme for implementing the Single European Sky involves making Eurocontrol regulations into Community law. Stastny estimates that the Commission's proposal for this lawmaking will be drafted ready for its consultation stage later this year.
Launching the plan
At its headquarters in Brussels on 17 February, Eurocontrol has set up a one-day brainstorming event for the top ATM service provider executives to launch its strategic safety action plan. This reflects Eurocontrol's belief that service providers must accelerate the implementation of the ESARRs, and for the agency itself to work harder on the "ESARRs implementation monitoring and support programme" (ESIMS), which was set up in the third quarter of 2002 to try to help the service providers move forward. It has made initial assessments of all the Eurocontrol member states, says Stastny, and is working with the non-Eurocontrol ECAC states. Eurocontrol says its message to the service providers is that "the status quo is not an option, improvements are needed and speed is vital". Among the main impediments to ESARRs implementation, according to the SEC annual report, is a lack of commitment to providing an independent ATM safety oversight system. Most ATM service providers are also their own oversight agencies.
When the system fails
After the July 2002 mid-air collision over southern Germany between a Bashkirian Airlines Tupolev Tu-154M and a DHL Boeing 757 - both of which had working ACAS - Eurocontrol set up a high level European action group for ATM safety (AGAS). The collision was the accident that could not happen, which added to the shock felt by the whole aviation industry, particularly ATM providers. It took place in uncrowded airspace in the middle of the night. The weather was good. But safety-net systems on the ground and in the air did not work.
On the ground, the controller's short-term conflict alert (STCA) was down for maintenance, and when both pilots got their ACAS resolution advisories (RA) the controller simultaneously noticed the developing conflict and called Bashkirian with an instruction that countermanded the RA. The Bashkirian pilot's standard operating procedure was to follow the controller's instruction if it clashed with an RA, so both pilots descended toward collision. The final report has been drafted, but is not expected to be published for some time due to the need for legal approval. Since then, however, national differences in the procedures pilots follow on receiving an RA have been resolved in favour of following the RA even if countermanded by the controller.
The AGAS has identified and published a list of "high priority areas" for ATM safety. These include:
safety-related human resources in ATM; a lack of incident reporting and data sharing; ACAS RA procedures; ground-based safety nets (STCA and MSAWS); runways and runway safety; the need for enforcement of ESARRs and the monitoring of their implementation; awareness of safety matters; safety research and development.Since AGAS made its recommendations, the SRC has launched an initiative it calls "lessons not learned". If the SRC had a single theme, it would be its belief that ESARRs implementation will create a system in which people are more likely to learn lessons without the pain of accidents.
Source: Flight International
