8 October 2010

CANSO – the Civil Air Navigation Services Organisation has joined the ACI (Airports Council International) Europe and Eurocontrol Airport Collaborative Decision-Making (A-CDM) programme that aims to increase operational efficiencies at the most congested European airports. CANSO is the global trade body for air traffic management (ATM) and is expected to provide further momentum for the initiative that was launched in October 2008. A-CDM allows airports into the (Air Transport Movement) ATM network and vice versa, providing users access to a range of operational data allowing them to make their operations more efficient. It has been estimated that by reducing the taxi time of just one minute per flight for major European airports with over 50,000 aircraft movements per year could lead to annual reductions of 145,000 tonnes of fuel and 475,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions.

CDM is seen as an important tool in the ambitions of the Single European Sky (SES) because of the contribution to the better use of existing airport/ATM capacity. Currently, operations have been based on non-coordinated planning processes where there is no possibility to harmonise the en-route part with the airport part of a flight. A-CDM aims to enhance coordination, cooperation and performance between all the partners involved – ATC, airlines, airport and ground handling. It also aims to improve the decision-making capabilities of the different partners by sharing the existing information resources.

Since the programme was launched two years ago, 30 airports have now engaged in its implementation, of which 10 of these airports will have A-CDM fully implemented by the end of 2011. A-CDM should enable a reduction of around 10% of the aircraft taxi time for an individual airport the size of Munich Airport (around 34 million passengers annually), equating to annual cost savings in the region of £3.17 million[1] per airport.

http://www.aci-europe.org/upload/10_10_05%20A-CDM%20joint%20press%20release.pdf


[1] Reported as €3.6 million