Weekly review #62 - 19th August

Last month, Spain's air traffic navigation manager handled a total of 81,339 flights, a 63.1% drop. By comparison, April saw flights fall by 94.7%, May by 93.8% and in June the decrease was 89.7%. ENAIRE is developing a recovery plan to assist air traffic control operations in stages, based on expected demand and utilising the available resources. 

Frankfurt airport served a total of 1,318,502 passengers in July, which is a 10% increase from the numbers for June and the number of flights are increasing for ORO Navigacija. NAV CANADA are also resuming their night-time service at five Atlantic Canada locations. Certainly a lot of improving indicators for times to come. 

Of course, these numbers are down from the same time last year, but it's good to see that alongside procedures for the health and safety of employees and passengers and recovery plans being put in place, we're experiencing an encouraging rebound for the industry. 

ANSP news

• French Air Navigation Service Provider DSNA Completes First License Certification Using UFA, Inc. ATTower Simulator - The certification process consisted of a one-hour session in the CDG tower under real condition and subsequently two hours in the UFA simulator.

• ​NAV CANADA announces changes to customer service charges - The service charge increases average 29.5% on overall rate levels and are effective September 1, 2020, except where otherwise noted. The Announcement includes provisions to ease the cash flow impact of the increases on its customers through payment deferral mechanisms.

• ORO Navigacija - The number of flights is increasing, but it will take long before we return to the level of the previous year - Just as it was expected, the statistics for July shows growing numbers in the flight flows. The numbers were influenced by reduced restraints pertaining to COVID-19, especially the restrictions in border permeability. Nevertheless, the newly elected head of state enterprise Oro Navigacija, who is so far the acting chief executive officer of the enterprise, Marius Beliūnas remarks, that it is still a bit too early to rejoice as the situation is not stable yet.

• The flights managed by ENAIRE in July recovered significantly compared to previous months of the pandemic The flights managed by ENAIRE in July recovered significantly compared to previous months of the pandemic - The number of flights managed by ENAIRE in July recovered significantly from the previous months, which were affected more by the COVID-19 pandemic. Last month, Spain's air navigation manager handled a total of 81,339 flights, a 63.1% drop. This fall is significantly less than that recorded in the previous three months: in April, flights fell by 94.7%; In May, they did so by 93.8%, and in June the decrease was 89.7%.

Market news

• STR-SpeechTech selected to deliver a Hosted D-ATIS system to Rwanda | CANSO - As part of a larger airport infrastructure project, STR will be deploying a new StarCaster D-ATIS system at Kamembe International Airport for Rwanda Airports Company (RAC). While all the system hardware and software will reside in Kamembe, the StarCaster D-ATIS system will be configured as a hosted system capable of providing Automatic Terminal Information Service (ATIS) for Kamembe International Airport (HRZA) and Kigali International Airport (HRYR).

Reports and data

• Fraport Traffic Figures – July 2020: Passenger Traffic Remains Low in Frankfurt and at the Group’s Airports Worldwide - Across the Group, passenger numbers are still below previous year’s level – Slight rebound continues thanks to holiday travel.

• Frankfurt Airport: Weekly Traffic Figures for August 3 – 9, 2020

Research and innovation

• A first successful step for SWIM governance - On 31 July 2020, the final deliverables SWIM Governance Project were delivered to the SESAR Deployment Manager (SDM), thus concluding more than 3 years of collaborative work involving 20 partners as diverse as airports, airlines, air navigation service providers, meteorological service providers, military organizations and Eurocontrol.

• Driving sustainability with Amsterdam Schiphol Airport’s taxibot - Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport is piloting a new sustainable taxiing solution that involves the use of a taxibot to keep aircraft engines off during taxiing. Ilaria Grasso Macola speaks to the project’s main stakeholders to find out more about the trial and the future of sustainable taxiing solutions.

• Danube FAB - Case study for DANUBE FAB VCS project - DANUBE FAB prepares for cross-border communications with a solid foundation for virtual centre capabilities.

UAV and UTM

• Social acceptance of UAM - A great unknown - Think Research

• New Aveillant White Paper Published: Best Practice in Counter-Drone Systems - Aveillant - The rapidly increasing use of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) or drones, has seen several high profile airport closures due to drone activity, and a heightened interest in methods for the timely detection, tracking, classification and mitigation of non-cooperative and potentially harmful flights. This Aveillant White Paper explores some of the data relating to this risk for an airport – what are the risk areas, what is the likelihood of an incident, and what could be the impact of an incident.

• PrecisionHawk Awarded Patents for Unmanned Air Traffic Management (UTM) - Air Traffic Management - PrecisionHawk, Inc., a pioneer in geospatial data acquisition and analysis for enterprises, today announced it has been awarded two patents for technologies it has developed for unmanned aircraft system traffic management (UTM). The patents, titled ‘Automated Unmanned Air Traffic Control System,’ are designed to enable collision avoidance between drones and manned aircraft. This is achieved by transmitting real-time flight data from drones to a UTM server prior to and while in-flight.