A6 Alliance position on the report of the Wise Person Group

The A6 Alliance has published its response to the report last month by the Wise Persons Group.

The A6 Alliance supports certain principles raised in the WPG recommendations to:

  • Adopt a more network-oriented (rather than network-centric) approach for managing Europe’s ATM network, with a reinforced and effective CDM process and governance. Roles and responsibilities must be clearly defined, preventing duplication and overlap and taking into account where accountabilities and liabilities lie.
  • Improve the regulatory framework to refine the performance metrics (KPIs) against which ANSPs are measured, reflect KPI interdependency, and continuously incentivise the accelerated deployment of new technologies that will help increase flexible and scalable provision of capacity.  As a principle, these should be real incentives for early movers, and not transferred only to airline customers.
  • Implement a Digital European Sky, and evolve the role of delivering ATM.  The A6 Alliance supports the Airspace Architecture Study (AAS) and the introduction of a Seamless European Airspace System. The SES Digital Backbone (SDB) proposed by the A6 Alliance and Eurocontrol is an example of the active role of ANSPs as one of the instruments of choice to manage the implementation of the Digital European Sky.

Some ideas put forward in the report require further discussion before the A6 Alliance feels able to support them. These include establishing a contractual capacity-based system, and the creation of a network-wide Infrastructure Manager.  Other ideas, such as a common route charge over a Seamless European Upper Airspace System and a European-wide economic regulator are not supported by the A6 Alliance, which is unconvinced of the feasibility or benefits such approaches would deliver.

The A6 Alliance looks forward to continuing discussions with policy-makers and operational stakeholders on how best to progress the Single European Sky initiative, taking in to account the WPG report, the AAS and other contributions such as the recently published CANSO 8 point vision.