Things like the Single European Sky (SES), SESAR, even the FABs were supposed to bring a fresh air to European ATM, dispensing once and for all with bad habits and procedures that kept making life for airspace users unnecessarily hard and expensive.
Among those old habits, the persistent mismatch between mandates to equip aircraft and adding the capability concerned to ANSPs was one of the most striking and expensive. What did this mean? The industry, sometimes all on its own but more often after “gentle persuasion” by the service providers “agreed” that a new piece of kit had to be bolted on the airplanes and a date was set by which time the new kit had to be operational. There was never a mandate for the ground to also equip, this happened in a haphazard way if it happened at all and often aircraft flew around for years with totally useless boxes on board that had cost a fortune to install with no benefit at all (just think of Mode S enhanced surveillance if you want an example).
One would think that under SES and its Implementing Rules (IR) this kind of mismatch is a thing of the past. Fat chance.
A few days ago two new SES IRs were published in the EU Official Journal.
Regulation No 1206/2011 prescribes that air navigation service providers must make use of the aircraft identification down-linked via Mode S by the second of January of the year 2020. This is a cool 17 years after the corresponding airborne retrofit date which was in 2003. Oooops….
But Regulation No 1207/2011 is an even nicer example that nothing has changed. Under this mandate aircraft must be retrofitted with ADS-B Out by 7 December 2017 and new aircraft must be equipped with the same technology from 8 January 2015. This is laudable right? It sure is except that there is a catch. The regulation does not direct the ANSPs to make use of this technology… Just like in the old days!
It is a fallacy to believe that just because of SES and SESAR ANSPs have suddenly turned into sheep and will now start dismantling the old radars and use ADS-B instead. Most of them have bought new Mode S gear quite recently and those will be there for a long time to come. Wasting money unnecessarily long if there is no mandate to get rid of all that obsolete iron.
One of the most important new features of the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking concept submitted by IATA to EUROCONTROL several years ago was that it made it compulsory for every mandate to have an element for the airborne side and an element for the ground side. Precisely to eliminate this kind of crazy situation. At the time there was general agreement that this novel feature must be part of any new, official rulemaking process.
The EU Implementing Rule scenario was originally built on the frame proposed by IATA more than 15 years ago. Why is it possible to still issue a rule that does not cover the ground side also?
By the way, the ADS-B out rule is not the only one that does not talk about using something that has been mandated for airborne equipage. The same thing had happened with air/ground digital link and CPDLC. While there is a mandate to equip both the air and the ground, its use is optional.
But why is this a problem?
The airside business case for CPDLC as well as ADS-B is predicated on the capacity increase and cost savings, respectively, these new features will bring. If however the use of CPDLC is not mandatory, there can be no structural increase in capacity and hence the airborne investment will have been for nothing. The same is true for ADS-B. If the old radars are not eliminated to the extent possible, the cost savings on which the airborne business case is predicated will not be realized, killing the business case.
Do the ANSPs really need a mandate to start moving on, for instance, ADS-B? Some may not need it but most do. They are no better or worse than the airlines…
Nice one Steve. You might have added that ‘making use’ of the ID isn’t likely of itself to bring any enormous, or quite possibly any, capacity benefits. In fact as a parameter that by definition doesn’t change from departure to arrival, why are we downlinking it every 5 seconds anyway? The same information is available from a phone line. The one group who might make use of it are our friends in long beards and mediaeval attitudes who will find it easier to target a particular flight if the fancy takes them, since encryption isn’t even discussed.
As for the wider issue of whether any progress is being made in ATM, in Europe, one can’t even say the jury is out; the answer is NO, and the sooner everyone wakes up and pulls the plug on these worthless projects and starts again from first principles, the better. The UK just recently ditched its €15 billion project to relaunch its Health Service IT infrastructure after the project reached 3 times the original time estimate and 5 times the cost, without any sign of eventual success. It can happen.
Most ATM improvements can only work when both aircraft AND the ANSPs are equppied with compatible systems within the same time scales. Unless air/ground developments are made in parallel it is impossible to reap any benefits. Yet time and time again mandates have been required for airborne equipment without making the necessary changes on the ground. The Mode S saga is a particularly obvious case in point.
I would go even further, it is equally essential that the corresponding ground systems are able to communicate and to share this data across the whole of continetal Europe and for this information to be used on a continental scale.
In my view it is outrageous that these simple requirements have not been followed. Indeed, as Steve has stated above, that is exactly why 15 years ago IATA proposed to EUROCONTROL the European NPRM process.
Are the SES and SESAR investigating the real requirements of the airspace users or are they just allowing the ANSPs to follow their own agendas? From what I hear it is the latter and most of the improvements proposed in the SESAR Concept of Operations are being ignored.
Will this be yet another lost opportunity? EATCHIP promised much, ATM2000+ looked even better but neither were fully implemented. The SES and SESAR look as though they are going the same way.
Perhaps Alex is right and it is time to pull the plug.