Weekly review #48- May 13

ANSP news

• NAV CANADA implements temporary level of service changes to ensure the continuity and safety of Canada’s air navigation system - Air navigation services will be temporarily suspended overnight at 18 air traffic service facilities, including air traffic control towers and flight service stations, and locations which receive remote airport advisory services, subject to prevailing conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic.

• PANSA - Crisis is an opportunity for a digital revolution in aviation - The Polish ANSP's president Janusz Janiszewski explains how PANSA sees not only a crisis but also an opportunity in the COVID-19 crisis: "Currently all our forces were redirected to testing innovative solutions developed by our knowledgeable experts for new technologies."

• LVNL introduces an extra system support in air traffic control tower for safer runway use at Schiphol - LVNL has introduced a new safety function in the air traffic control system at the towers at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. If a runway is unavailable, the new function warns the air traffic controller and blocks the electronic flight strips that are used in the tower.

• LVNL published investigation report on various occurrences and updates to procedure for publishing occurrence reports - LVNL has updated and added more transparency to its procedure for retransmissions of radiotelephony or RTF (radio communications between pilots and air traffic controllers). If RTF is used in the media, no request to discontinue retransmission will be sent to the media.

• Oro Navigacija financial results for 2019 - The ANSP of Lithuania confirmed audited net profit received in 2019 amounted to 3,095 thousand EUR and was higher by 2,973 thousand EUR than it was expected back in 2018 when the enterprise earned 4,329 thousand EUR of net profit.

• FAB CE supports EU-wide coordination of aviation recovery plans - As States and European Union regulators start the work of planning the aviation’s industry recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, FAB CE has written a letter of support for the European Aviation Safety Agency’s (EASA) Return to Normal Operations (RNO) programme, which recognises the importance of taking a European Union-wide coordinated response to recovery.

• Ready as traffic starts to recover: EUROCONTROL NM publishes Network Recovery Plan

Airports news

• Fraport Group Results for Q1 2020 - Revenue and Net Profit Heavily Impacted by COVID-19 Pandemic - For the first time since 2001, the new group result is in in negative territory. Steps to reduce costs were only partly able to offset the decline in revenue. In March the total passenger count was down 62%, with the discrepancy increasing to 90% in the final week of the quarter. This trend continued in April, when the shortfall widened to as much as 97 per cent on a week-to-week basis

• Cairns airport runway renewal starts - Cairns Airport’s $18M runway upgrade is off to a flying start in a project that will last for six weeks and ready the airport for the resumption of travel over the coming months as travel restrictions are eased.

• Heathrow airport calls for a unified roadmap for border reopening and reports on April passenger numbers - Passenger numbers were down 97% in April with the airport supporting essential travel for just 200,000 people in the entire month – the same number it would typically serve in just one day. CEO added "The Government needs to urgently lay out a roadmap for how they will reopen borders"

Market news

• Stuttgart Airport deploys 135 Era SQUID vehicle tracking units for surface management - Stuttgart Airport recently announced the selection of ERA company, the leading supplier of surveillance and ATM equipment worldwide, to deliver 135 vehicle-mounted SQUID transmitters as its surface vehicle tracking system. The contract was awarded to ERA thanks to good experience with the project of the ERA surface surveillance system NEO for Stuttgart airport, which has been currently installed.

• Rajiv Gandhi International Airport, Hyderabad makes transition to LED lights from ADB SAFEGATE - Both primary and secondary runways of the airport will install RELIANCE intelligent lights, a range of special LED lights that can be remote controlled to ensure high availability

• ENAIRE selects FREQUENTIS for their backup VCS - Frequentis will provide Spanish ANSP ENAIRE, with a contingency voice communication system for air traffic control towers at nine locations across Spain. The country-wide contingency VCS infrastructure will enable business continuity.

• CS-Soft reinforces their cooperation with universities - This year, the faculty included a project called "Software Applications in Aviation", where students can learn many specifics of aviation software development through cooperation with CS-soft software developers.

Context information

• NATS on preparing for the unknown - This NATS blog post addresses the variety of flights that keep operating in the COVID-19 crisis as well as how the ANSP keeps their ATCOs proficient and plans for the restart of traffic.

• IATA Covid Dashboard - This page by IATA collects and summarises COVID related NOTAMs and Aeronautical Information Circulaires (AIC).

Research and innovation

• Fast Time Simulation for an easier post-crisis transition - For the unprecedented situations created by the COVID-19, the effect of social distancing rules on terminal processes and capacity, the available expertise and knowledge is limited. A way of bridging the knowledge gap is being able to visualize and quantitatively analyze potential scenarios, and how their performance is affected by different variables. to70 believe Fast-Time Simulation can contribute in the transition to the “New Normal”.

• Re-opening airports with COVID-19 measures - simulating passengers flows in terminals - Think Research simulated various new passenger processing processes in terminals with various recovery levels and this article presents the results.

UAV and UTM

• Automated acquisition of geodata for safe integration of Drones into airspace - DFS Deutsche Flugsicherung, intends to use highly precise geodata to register and publish no-fly zones for drones. This is an important prerequisite for the safe and fair integration of unmanned aircraft systems into German airspace. For this purpose, DFS has initiated the fAIRport project in cooperation with wetransform and the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research.