The A6 Alliance considers that cooperation between all operational stakeholders (ANSPs, Airports, Airspace Users, Staff and the EU Network Manager) to be the key to ensuring the success of any initiative to improve the current ATM system.
Operational resilience will become increasingly important as traffic increases. For the A6 Alliance, this means that the future architecture must ensure appropriate levels of fallback and the ability to transfer operations between partners in the event of serious failures.
The A6 Alliance also advocates for “intelligent regulation” at both national and supra-national level that is focused on driving outcomes rather than inputs.
The A6 Alliance does not support the concept of a EUIR that only focuses on higher level airspace and would create a new European-wide monopoly. It is difficult to see how the many network performance requirements relating to safety, cost efficiency, service quality, service resilience, security, competitiveness, flexibility and responsiveness could be met by handing a large volume of upper airspace to a single service provider.
Rather, it should be an airspace within which the airspace classifications and rules that are applied are harmonized, with consistent and widespread application of advanced ATM tools to manage aircraft trajectories safely (deconfliction) and efficiently.
Flights within this airspace should not be trajectory constrained either by national boundaries or ATM service provider, and should be highly resilient to any disruption through technical failures or social/industrial issues. Close cooperation between all stakeholders will drive a high performing network.