More than 32 participants from 10 States and 2 international organizations attended the Twenty-Fifth Meeting of the Air Traffic Management Group – Eastern part of the ICAO EUR Region (ATMGE/25) which, thanks to the kind invitation/support of EUROCONTROL was organized in Brussels, Belgium from 25 to 27 April 2018.
The Group had extensive discussions on the Coordination and harmonized implementation of the Aviation System Block Upgrade B0 and B1 in the 4 performance improvement areas (airport operations, globally interoperable systems & data, optimum capacity & flexible flights, efficient flight path). EUROCONTROL gave several detailed presentations on how the regional monitoring of ASBU implementation is done, through the existing processes such as the European ATM Master Plan and its LSSIP monitoring mechanism. The basics of the ATM Master Plan level3, the details of the LSSIP monitoring as well as the available IT-tools for monitoring and mapping were also presented. Finally, the EUROCONTROL State Liaison Officer from Georgia presented the Georgian experience with the LSSIP process and explained the links to the ASBU monitoring requirements.
In addition, EUROCONTROL presented detailed information on the latest EUROCONTROL Voluntary ATM Incident Reporting EVAIR Statistics for 2012-2017, which addressed (from over 14000 collected reports) general statistics with main ATM events & causes. The events included RWY incursions, Call Sign Similarity/Confusion (CSS/C), ACAS RAs, Laser beam incidents, wake turbulence incidents, incidents with UAS/RPAS/Drones, GPS outage and jamming, missed approaches/go-arounds/aborted approaches, level busts, loss of air-ground communications. As a separate issue, the growing numbers of reports on large scale GNSS outage and jamming were explained in detail and the numbers of affected FIRs has grown considerably. The Network Manager TOP 5 Safety issues were also presented. The ATMGE members were again invited to investigate the possibility to further support (submission of incident reports from non-EUROCONTROL States, share national data that can be released) the EVAIR programme.
Several presentations regarding proposals for amendments of PANS ATM, presenting the modernisation activities in the United States and the FAA's NextGen program and on the implementation activities for the EUR Regional Performance Framework were also discussed during this ATMGE meeting.
The ATMGE participants also visited the Network Manager Operations Center, which included presentations of all the various operational NMOC services.
