No Sir, it was NOT!!!!
If ATC Global Insight is to be believed, Mr. Maurice Georges, CEO of French DSNA, said in Amsterdam that “The SESAR operational concept has been built on FABs from day one.”
Well, I do not know which SESAR operational concept they use in France but the concept we wrote and which bears the text, inter alia, “…it is considered that the level of detail reached in the work and the degree of assessment performed are sufficient to give guidance on what should be contained in the SESAR Master Plan.” does not talk about FABs. This is of course WP2.2.2, Deliverable D3, the famous CONOPs, the only real concept of operations that reflects the discussions in the definition phase. That is “from day one” to use Mr. Georges’ words.
This document mentions Functional Airspace Blocks only once towards the end in the context of provision of meteorological information and the abbreviation of FAB is not shown at all!!!
That one lonely mention of the functional airspace block is obviously an editorial oversight because we were very careful not to mix a legacy concept like the FAB into a future oriented concept like SESAR.
Why was that?
To understand this, we must go back a little in history. For many years and through many programs like EATCHIP and ATM2000+, Europe tried to update its ATM system along continent-wide lines to harmonize things in an effort to make an end to the delay crisis. While some progress was made, States’ reluctance to relinquish even a little of their ATM castle mentality basically prevented any big breakthrough. When finally the European Commission got fed up with the obfuscation, the idea of Functional Airspace Blocks and the Single European Sky were invented in the hope that under the stewardship of the EC things would go faster. Fat channce…
In all the hoopla currently surrounding FAB implementation it is easy to forget that the FABs were not embraced with enthusiasm at first and the reluctant brides, the ANSPs had to be dragged to the altar kicking and screaming… causing considerable delay in FAB implementation.
Add to this the sad fact that in the previously fragmented European environment the FABs represent fragmentation on a larger scale… They are in fact a pragmatic admission that it is not possible to create a truly Europe-wide harmonization project. Just look at the number of FABs and their delimitations to see what I mean.
The whole idea of the FAB is anchored in the legacy airspace based paradigm. This was not necessarily a problem 10 years ago when our thinking about trajectory based operations was still in an early stage. Had the FABs been implemented early as originally planned, they would have created a good basis for taking the next step, going to trajectory based operations envisaged by SESAR.
With the FAB implementation running so late, its legacy airspace paradigm is on a collision course with the trajectory based concept of SESAR.
But this collision will not be solved by pretending that SESAR has always been FAB based.
It is much better, even if less politically correct, to admit that the 4D business/mission trajectory of the SESAR concept is blind to FAB fragmentation and for it to work properly, FABs are not needed at all. But since they will be there, at least they must be made transparent and then phased out as soon as possible.
The much hyped three level organization of the Single European Sky (SES), being local, FABs and network, is nothing but a further sad admission that Europe is not capable of thinking European. This multi-layer management of traffic is not new… last time it was tried, its failure led to the establishment of the Central Flow Management Unit. Why are we rushing into the same, parochial thinking motivated, pitfall again, recreating as it were the pre-CFMU times?
Yes sir, the FAB is an idea the time of which has gone while everyone was busy arguing how to get a bigger slice of the cake.
In the meantime you must bend the FABs to SESAR and not the other way round.
It would be truly tragic for the industry if the forward looking, trajectory based concept of SESAR were to be corrupted by the legacy, airspace based paradigm of the FABs.
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