Easing the Russian ski traffic
31 JAN 2012
Winter holidays are one of the many special events that can have a major impact on air traffic management. They are planned and coordinated with care to ensure the best possible performance of the European aviation network during these busy weeks.
Unsurprisingly, Russians love to ski - and especially over the new year and the Orthodox Christmas holidays. This “ski traffic” is becoming heavier and heavier each year - and delays were mounting in tandem. But this year, there was very little delay, thanks to the Russian’s recent excellent cooperation with the Network Manager!
At the beginning of 2010, Poland reported crushing overloads of ski traffic, mostly coming from Moscow, and going to resorts in France, Austria and Germany. Up to 80% of the flights were taking place outside the departure window, which became hard to handle because nobody knew for certain when they would turn up.
Traffic from Moscow is classified “OOO” (out of area) and the Ops Room had no information on the departures - and this traffic is not subject to regulation. Because of this, overloads began to build up.
Something had to be done. So, through ICAO, the CFMU (as it was in those days) contacted the Russian MATMC to organise an exercise to plan traffic flows together.
The Russian authorities and EUROCONTROL worked hard together to convince airports and airlines to respect the international regulations governing slot windows and this effort, combined with very good collaboration at the planning level, resulted in only 15% of flights being flown outside the flight window in the 2012 holidays.
The NM ops people are grateful to Minsk FMP (which was set up according to the EUROCONTROL format!). They were very helpful in liaising with Moscow. Both Minsk and Moscow are now members of the North-East Axis Management Group, which is working hard on preparing for the traffic loads expected at the EURO2012 football games this summer.
Since last winter, Moscow has been sending departure messages to IFPS for all westbound flights - and this time, we are a bit behind in that we are not yet sending arrival messages to Moscow, but we are working on it and will soon have all the processes in place!
A Memorandum of Cooperation between EUROCONTROL and the Russian Federation should be signed in the course of 2012, and this will lay the path to even better coordination.
More: along the lines of its five-year improvement plan, Russia is consolidating its airspace and centres and plans to reduce its 87 ACCs to just 19. They aim to be fully computerised by 2015 and will increase their sector and en route capacity accordingly - good news for all their airspace users!