ERA supports NM Operational Excellence Workshop

On 13/14 February, ANSPs, Airspace User Associations, airports and the military met at EUROCONTROL to take part in the Network Directors of Operations (NDOP) Workshop on Operational Excellence. This programme has been initiated by the Network Management Board and aims to address several important areas between now and 2025.

13 operational and 3 technical work streams have been identified, which in turn will be broken down to individual tasks within each work stream. Through the use of stakeholder ‘champions’, supported by the Network Manager, the project aims to address issues such as defragmentation of the European airspace, seamless cross-border operations, improvement of operational procedures as well as identifying technical and operational evolutions in order to improve performance and align ‘best in class’ performance.

Whilst the focus is predominantly on the en route and TMA procedures and processes which understandably centres on the ANSP and airport, there are numerous packages of work that could benefit from airline insight and experience. An example would be looking at flight planning processes and practices in order to ascertain how to best utilise route availability and looking interoperability / requirements with regards to support tools.

The ERA Operations Group received a high-level briefing from Zarko Sivcev, the NM Operational Excellence project manager, at their meeting in Madrid in March to explain more about this next chapter in deploying operational and technical evolutions in a harmonised manner across the Network.