Dragan Bilać, Director General of Croatia Control Ltd, the state-owned company providing air navigation services, on Thursday presented a new air navigation control system, described as state of the art and one of the safest air navigation control systems in Europe. Present at the project launch were Croatian Regional Development and EU Funds Minister Branko Grčić and Maritime, Transport and Infrastructure Minister Siniša Hajdaš Dončić.
A final step towards harmonization of seven European air traffic control centres has been taken with setting in operations the Thales TopSky-ATC system in Zagreb Air Traffic Control Centre in February 2014. Croatia Control Ltd (CCL) has become the fifth COOPANS Air Navigation Service Provider (ANSP) beside Austro Control, Irish Aviation Authority, Naviair from Denmark and LFV from Sweden, equipped with one of the most advanced air traffic management systems in Europe.
The transition was carried out without delays or other inconveniences for the airspace users and adjacent control units. CCL managed to deploy the system in extremely short timeframe and in accordance with the initial budget and plan. This was backed with excellent support from COOPANS partners, Thales commitment and advantages obtained from product maturity, which is inherited from operational usage of the common system baseline in the COOPANS centres of Dublin, Shannon, Malmö, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Vienna.
The new system enables the application of higher quality tools in the work of air traffic controllers whilst ensuring increased level of safety with a focus on meeting airspace users’ demands and conformance to the latest implementing rules.
The successful commissioning is considered as a major achievement for the five COOPANS ANSPs and Thales as the system supplier. At this point the same ATC system is running in seven control centres in five European countries as a result of the unique ANSP collaboration (COOPANS) and long-term partnership with Thales.
Although most of the 63 control centers on the continent have built different customized systems, COOPANS partnership is established to bring consistency to air traffic control systems in Europe by delivering a high level of standardization of ATC operations and being in line with the Single European Sky (SES) objectives. Furthermore, COOPANS platform being deployed in three different European Functional Airspace Blocks (FABs) has proven to be the most versatile ATC system in operations and in accordance with the international and European standards.
As a result of the cooperation, the partners have already and will continue to benefit from significant reduction in development, deployment and operating costs. This result is achieved thanks to unified working platform and common operational concepts as well as providing a platform of expertise for the most experienced experts from their operational and technical staff for cooperation in harmonisation and solution engineering. TopSky-ATC open architecture enables COOPANS members to continuously introduce new technologies, advanced concepts and latest innovations following SES and SESAR roadmaps in a cost-efficient way.
The harmonised ATM system used by the COOPANS members will result in safe operation, shorter distances and duration of flights for the benefit of ATC cost reduction to airliners, and contribute to the protection of the environment by reducing fuel consumption and greenhouse gases emission.
