Partnership

Skyguide’s Virtual Centre programme is not the only European air traffic management (ATM) project that is seeking to move away from silo-based, location dependent ATM service provision. COOPANS is an international successful partnership between the air navigation service providers (ANSP) of Austria (Austro Control), Croatia (Croatia Control), Denmark (Naviair), Ireland (Irish Aviation Authority), Portugal (NAV Portugal) and Sweden (LFV). The six ANSPs work with their common industry supplier, Thales, to harmonise specifications, development plans and ways of working. According to Ulf Thibblin, Technical Director of LFV, it will provide the next generation digital ATM platform that will enable a COOPANS virtual centre concept and cross-border ATM services.

Can you describe the COOPANS concept?

Instead of specifying and developing an ATM system on a country-by country basis, we share the development between the partners. Through COOPANS, partners have been able to cut their development costs by at least 20 %. Concerning the future, COOPANS is in the middle of implementing a longterm strategy in the spirit of the ATM Masterplan by developing open standardised architectures, virtualisation, modularising and standardising of systems and ways-of-working so that we jointly or individually can develop business services and make them available to the COOPANS community. Develop once and deploy many times – as we say. Another cornerstone for the future is to enable a multivendor digital platform and an innovation platform where different suppliers and customers can integrate and test different solutions. Horizontal integration and cooperation are key for speeding up innovation.

What have you learnt from your 15 years of working together?

We started as a buyers’ club to save costs through harmonised and shared development but now we are organised like a company with a long-term strategy, operational plans and an organisational structure. We have learnt that we can always be more efficient and that we continuously must develop our organisation and ways of working. Lowering costs is still a top priority, but flexibility, scalability, robustness, environmental footprint and speed of innovations are also key priorities.

Supporting each other, cooperation and an open dialogue is key for success for COOPANS but also for the European ATM. We are currently working at a high level of harmonisation, but we need to take further steps operationally and technically and we are talking more and more about standardisation. As there are always national requirements which are specific to each ANSP, we also need the flexibility to share and harmonise so to allow local solutions.

When moving towards a future with standardised controller working positions, harmonisation from an operational and technical perspective is essential so a controller from one country can manage traffic in other countries. In our operational harmonisation groups, chief operating officers and operational experts are discussing how new regulations, as well as external and internal standards can be introduced among all partners to take long-term harmonisation further. For our industry partner it leads to an operationally driven state of the art product. It is a clear win-win situation.

What are some of the obstacles to working even more closely together?

COOPANS has an objective to create a Virtual Centre concept for the “COOPANS airspace”. The cross-border challenges to this, when six countries are involved, are many: Sovereignty is a major issue since there will always be national requirements that might be impacted differently in times of crisis or normal situations. Regulations, business models and more must be adapted as well.

We are finding ways to manage these challenges. For example, our original data centre concept focused on developing a single, common centre with a backup. However, the national data security regulations might prohibit this for all applications so a hybrid solution will be developed with local applications and shared applications. This has the benefit of building-in redundancy and means we can deploy new tools developed by one of the partners in a simple way throughout the network.

The Virtual Centre is an inspiration for us and Skyguide has shown it is possible, with a single airspace managed by a single system based on modern architecture. Implementing this across six countries will be a challenge but the benefits will be greater still.

What have been the lessons of COVID for you?

The crisis has shown that Europe’s ATM system is rigid. We have to get rid of some legacy systems and legacy ways of working and develop solutions that are more robust but also a total functional system that is more scalable and flexible. The pandemic means large financial strains for all of us but at the same time we need to move faster, push digitalisation by participating in SESAR3 and look for wider cooperation to share and accelerate development.

COOPANS sees the future in European wide integration and cooperation including both ANSPs and industry suppliers. It’s a necessity to work together with neighbouring countries to maximise the operational benefits. To reach economies of scale, it’s a necessity to share infrastructure and applications, to develop once and to deploy at many sites. By efficient and open cooperation, we can all of us move faster together to bring real value to stakeholders.