Le Bourget: EGNOS reception - Address by David McMillan

EUROCONTROL is proud to have been involved with EGNOS since its inception more than 15 years ago.  Long before the signature of the tripartite agreement between ESA, the European Community and EUROCONTROL in 1998 a fruitful cooperation on satellite navigation was established between these three European organisations. 

Since the very beginning, the Agency has been working with aviation stakeholders to develop the aviation requirements for satellite navigation.  We have worked with international standardisation bodies to ensure that the requirements being applied to EGNOS are globally harmonised and that interoperability is assured. 

And since the first EGNOS Test-Bed signals were broadcast, more than ten years ago, the Agency has been monitoring the signal and assessing its performance using specially developed data analysis tools.

Now that we have passed a significant milestone - the declaration of the Safety of Life service - the Agency is coordinating the introduction of approach procedures that take advantage of EGNOS. 

And that’s because EGNOS is one of the technological solutions to help us to improve today’s Non Precision Approach operations and provide a defined vertical path to every runway end in Europe – as recommended by ICAO. 

This will improve safety during approach and provide access to airports with lower weather minima than today’s operations.  It can also provide a reliable back-up to instrument landing systems (ILS) for times when they are out of service.  All this without the installation of any additional ground equipment at the airports. 

The introduction of EGNOS Approaches is part of a wider implementation of new navigation capabilities in the shape of what we now call PBN, which stands for Performance Based Navigation. 

On behalf of the European Union, EUROCONTROL is currently developing an Implementing Rule on PBN which will establish the navigation capabilities for European Airspace in the coming years. 

However, I digress - back to EGNOS

A number of flight trials to demonstrate the operational benefits were performed by EUROCONTROL before the EGNOS service was declared available last March.  Now that the service is available the Agency is driving the implementation of Approach procedures through a number of pioneer projects. 

These include:

• the French project with the Airbus Beluga aircraft and the procedure in Pau,
• a British project in the Channel Islands with NATS and Aurigny Air Services; and
• a Polish project in cooperation with PANSA (the Polish ANSP) and an operator of small general aviation type aircraft. 

EGNOS is the first step in Europe’s satellite navigation developments.  And of course, we’re looking forwards to Galileo.  Indeed, within the SESAR programme, we’re looking at the future of multi-constellation Global Navigation Satellite systems and the opportunities they will provide.

I would just like to close by adding my voice to those of my colleagues here in congratulating everyone involved with this project.  Thank you.

For more information:

• www.ecacnav.com
• http://www.esa.int
• http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/policies/satnav/egnos/index_en.htm

• Address by David McMillan pdf - 16.927 kB