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31st EUROCONTROL Military ATM Board examines key defence and technological issues facing military aviation

6 October 2022

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Today Europe’s top military air traffic management officials attended the 31^st EUROCONTROL Military ATM Board (MAB) to examine the key defence and technological issues facing military aviation at a time of heightened tensions due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“Civil military coordination via EUROCONTROL has never been more important”, said EUROCONTROL’s Head of Civil Military Cooperation Major General Karsten Stoye, once again underscoring how strong cooperation and coordination are essential on all topics affecting European aviation, in order to avoid adverse impacts on national and collective defence capabilities.

On the technological side, key topics discussed were impacts on the military related to the ongoing modernisation of ATM, including the new set-up for the SESAR Deployment Manager (SDM), CEF Call 2022, developments in system-wide information management (SWIM), and a series of core technical issues that need to be tackled such as integration of military trajectory data with dedicated solutions, practical aspects of collaborative decision-making, the potential use of Dynamic Mobile Areas in airspace, and the military requirements (ops, tech & safety) that need to be met to allow iOAT flight plans to be processed by the EUROCONTROL Network Manager’s systems.

Maj-Gen Karsten Stoye (left) and Maj-Gen (retd.) Eric Labourdette (right)

The MAB also looked at the emerging civil-military interface that U-space will require. U-space users (urban air taxis, drones, etc.) will, once the sector takes off, have strong implications for security, defence and safety, as will, far above them in the sky, higher airspace operations, an area that EUROCONTROL is coordinating developments at European level. And civil-military CNS interoperability issues continue to preoccupy military experts, in particular ensuring the compliance of military GNSS receivers for State aircraft operations in a PBN environment.

The meeting was also a chance to bid farewell to the current MAB Chair, Major General (retd.) Eric Labourdette, and welcome his successor, Air Commodore (retd.) Richard Moir and thank EUROCONTROL’s Member States and partner organisations (European Commission, EDA, NATO, SDM and the SJU) for their inputs.