Updated February 25 at 10 a.m.

Europe will postpone requiring aircraft operators to equip for controller-pilot datalink communications (CPDLC) for five years until February 2020 due to technical problems. The European Commission expects the entity managing the Single European Sky ATM Research (Sesar) effort will recommend remedial actions for ground infrastructure issues next year.

At a meeting in Brussels in mid-January, the Single Sky Committee that advises the EC endorsed a draft implementing regulation that amends the commission’s 2009 datalink services regulation—(EC) No 29/2009—to allow the continent more time to implement CPDLC, or data messaging between pilots and controllers. “The Commission explained the proposed approach to suspend the application of the datalink regulation to extend deadlines and to use the time to find solutions to the existing problems,” a meeting summary said. “Some member states felt that the five-year suspension would be too long and that the momentum should be kept to solve the problems also in view of the investments already done.” But the representatives of European Union member states on the committee voted in favor of the proposed amending regulation.

Responding to an inquiry from AIN, Gzim Ocakoglu, policy officer with the EC Directorate for Mobility and Transport, said the commission was expected to formally adopt the amending regulation on February 26, after which the regulation will be published in the Official Journal of the European Union.

The original (EC) No 29/2009 required that aircraft operating in European airspace above 28,500 feet be equipped for datalink communications by this month. The original as well as the amended regulation exempt from the mandate aircraft equipped with the Fans 1/A datalink for oceanic operations that were delivered before January 2014. The new regulation will become applicable on Feb. 5, 2018, which is also the new ground system implementation date. The implementation date for airborne equipment is Feb. 5, 2020.

At the EC’s request in December 2013, the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) conducted an investigation to identify root causes of technical problems dating to the Link 2000+ program that Eurocontrol started a decade earlier to validate CPDLC using the VHF Datalink (VDL) Mode 2 communications protocol. Eurocontrol’s Maastricht Upper Area Control Center reported an abnormal number of datalink disconnections, or “provider aborts” (PAs), in 2008. Similarly, other air navigation service providers and aircraft operators encountered technical problems, particularly involving disconnections.

The EASA investigation, released last April, “revealed that the random PA occurrences could not be attributed to a single, predictable cause but rather to a combination of factors related to the radio frequency environment and to the current single frequency implementation of the datalink infrastructure,” the amending regulation states. EASA concluded “that acceptable datalink performance levels can only be established by deploying a multi-frequency infrastructure, which is also to be optimized for radio frequency interference prevention.”

In line with EASA’s recommendations, the EC directed the Sesar Joint Undertaking to draft a remedial work plan. It expects preliminary results by next year, with another two years required after that to validate solutions.