After two years of preparations and establishing clear rules, criteria and governance, Eurocontrol and some 40 air navigation service providers (ANSPs) signed the contract to formally launch a next-generation network for air traffic management (ATM) communications last month. The New Pan-European Network Service (NewPENS), will serve as the backbone for borderless data and voice communications connecting more than 100 locations across 47 countries in the European and North Atlantic Region.
In contrast to predecessor PENS, which was mainly used for communications between Eurocontrol and ANSPs, the new IP network aims to become the means of ground-to-ground communication for all connections between a wide spectrum of ATM stakeholders across the region. This includes the military, ATM providers, airports, meteorological services, and aircraft operators.
Already, one airport (Jersey) and one non-civil stakeholder (Royal Netherlands Air Force) have signed up to NewPENS. “Several new partners are knocking at the door,” boasted Maurice Georges, chairman of the NewPENS top management board and director of French air navigation service provider DSNA, during the signing ceremony at Eurocontrol’s headquarters near Brussels airport. Key, he explained, “was to have enough ANSPs commit to NewPENS to secure a smooth transition.” Participation is open to stakeholders from outside Eurocontrol’s 41 member states, with Nav Canada taking part from the beginning.
Collaborative Approach to ATM
NewPENS was not designed specifically for Europe’s business aviation sector, but operators will reap the benefits of the network upgrade. “In the face of unstoppable traffic demand, NewPENS will deliver a more reliable, safer and more secure way of transferring business-critical data between all aviation players,” said Eurocontrol director general Eamonn Brennan, describing the new network as a “milestone” for the intergovernmental body and all air traffic management players. “We can’t run the system the way we are doing now. If we do, we will run into trouble.”
There were some 27,100 flights on a busy traffic day in 1999, Eurocontrol research reveals. This rose to 37,200 per day in summer 2017 and this is forecast to rise to 58,000 flights on a busy traffic day in 2030. There will be up to an additional 1,000 flights per day in 2024 compared to 2017 in several European countries such as France, Germany, Spain, and Turkey.
With some 722,000 flights in 2017, business aviation accounted for 6.8 percent of all flights in Europe, according to Eurocontrol data. This is a much lower share of the market than the low-cost and traditional scheduled airlines, which account for a 30.6 percent and a 52.1 percent share, respectively, but business aviation’s growth rate was higher at more than 6.2 percent on 2016 (the highest of all segments), compared to a just 3 percent year-on-year growth for the traditional scheduled segment and a 5.8 percent increase for low-cost carriers.
Europe is facing “significant” capacity challenges in the coming years, Brennan stressed. The capacity increases resulting from new technologies delivered by Sesar joint undertaking (JU) and Sesar deployment manager are quickly absorbed, he noted, adding that a much more data-centric and collaborative approach to ATM is vital. “NewPENS will provide solid support to European aviation,” he said.
Future Proof
NewPENS will be built on telecommunications company BT's IP network with mission-critical connections running on a dual-core infrastructure, offering parallel connectivity that is physically and logically separated to provide the “highest levels” of availability and resilience, the parties vowed. It will offer different "tiers" of service, from entry-level to mid-level, through to demanding high-end. Users will be invoiced only for the services they select.
The European Commission has provided some funding for the development of and the transition from PENS, which was launched in December 2009, to NewPENS. The migration to the new infrastructure will take place in clusters between October 2018 and Nov. 30, 2019, the date on which the current 10-year PENS contract expires. The PENS ground/ground communications infrastructure was provided and managed by SITA.
A main feature of NewPENS is that it is “future-proof and able to support future ATM applications, particularly for the system-wide information management (SWIM) architecture. It will be a key enabler for deploying services generated by the Sesar projects,” Georges said.
Satellite-based Navigation and Augmented Vision Technologies
The Sesar joint undertaking has developed a number of solutions and technologies addressing the business aviation community, in particular improved landing procedures, free routing at high altitudes, and remote tower technologies that allow service provision to remote airports and those with low or medium-sized traffic volumes.
Remote towers are springing up across Europe, with the recent establishment of a joint venture between Frequentis and German ANSP DFS for the worldwide delivery of turnkey remote tower projects evidencing the uptake and potential of the technology. DFS and Frequentis are currently setting up a remote tower center at Leipzig Airport and from the end of this year DFS air traffic controllers located at this center will control SaarbrĂĽcken International Airport. The airports in Erfurt and Dresden will follow.
Uptake of satellite-based augmentation systems (SBAS) precision approaches, using the European geostationary navigation overlay service (EGNOS), by European airports and aircraft operators is also expanding. SBAS is an “obvious example of a solution that was very much targeted for the business aviation sector because we know that operators of business and general aviation aircraft often fly in and out of airports that don’t necessarily have the infrastructure that the hub airports have or therefore don’t have ground-based instrument landing systems available,” David Bowen, Sesar JU chief of air traffic management, told AIN.
The Sesar-co-funded Augmented Approaches to Land (AAL) program moved into the implementation phase last year, following more than 360 trial flights, of which half were performed by Honeywell Aerospace and Dassault Aviation flight-test aircraft—a Dassault Falcon 900 and Falcon 7X, respectively. A majority of NetJets aircraft in Europe are already equipped with this new technology and it was a NetJets Embraer Phenom 300 that conducted the first SBAS approach into Germany's Bremen Airport last year.
“We continue to work on the topic in particular by combining SBAS navigation capabilities with enhanced vision systems [EVS] and synthetic vision systems [SVS], which will enable more efficient taxi, takeoff, and landing operations in low-visibility conditions. This is another solution that will really benefit the business aviation community,” Bowen asserted.
The AAL2 project, the follow-up of AAL, consists of a consortium of key aviation stakeholders including five small/medium sized airports—Antwerp, Le Bourget, Payerne, Bremen, and Perigueux–EBAA, Flying Group, Airbus, ATR, Dassault Aviation, Honeywell, and Elbit, as well as several regulatory bodies, ANSPs, and some European or intergovernmental organizations. Honeywell is coordinating the AAL2 project, which will run from 2018 to 2020.
EBAA is “very excited” to be a part of the AAL2 consortium, EBAA COO Robert Balthus told AIN. “It’s clear to our members and the business aviation sector as a whole that the benefits of the project— improved accessibility and alleviating airport and airspace traffic, particularly in congested, low-visibility conditions—will ensure better connectivity throughout the European airspace.”
