New European CCO/CDO Action Plan launched

Improving the efficiency of aircraft and the trajectories is a key pillar of aviation sustainability. One way of doing this is though continuous climb (CCO) and continuous descent (CDO) operations delivering less fuel consumption and fewer emissions. EUROCONTROL has worked with stakeholders, to produce the European CCO/CDO Action Plan.

A 2018 study from EUROCONTROL showed that the benefit from optimising the climb and descent phases included fuel savings of up to 350,000 tonnes per year for the airlines. At the time, this corresponded to over a million tonnes of CO₂ and €150 million in fuel costs.

These benefits come from minimising the time that aircraft spend flying level at low altitudes, where more fuel is burnt than at high altitudes.

Over the past two years, the CCO/CDO Task Force with stakeholders from airlines, airports, air traffic service providers and trade associations have met on a regular basis to bring all the different methodologies and metrics that stakeholders were using in Europe to measure CDO performance and on a harmonised definition, metric and parameters to measure CCO/CDO. This has now resulted in the publication of the new European CCO/CDO Action Plan earlier this month.

Building on the extensive experience and technical knowledge that industry stakeholders have in the area of vertical flight profiles, this plan also includes practical advice on how to make CCO/CDO work, with examples of best practices and how constraints can be best mitigated.

In conjunction with the action plan, EUROCONTROL have published CCO/CDO performance tables for all airports and airlines operating in Europe and this can be found at https://ansperformance.eu/efficiency/vfe/

The work of the CCO/CDO Task Force is now finished, but efforts related to further flight efficiency improvements will continue via the NM Route Network Development Sub Group (RNDSG) and members can expect further communications on this topic in January.