How LCIP became LSSIP: celebrating a quarter century

The annual event for LSSIP Stakeholders on 4 October 2018 was a little bit different. This year it included a celebratory lunch to commemorate twenty-five years of reporting on harmonised Air Traffic Management implementation planning and monitoring activities across Europe.

Guest speaker, Jean-Louis Renteux, was pleased to be back at EUROCONTROL’s Brussels headquarters, fifteen years after his retirement. Having first been involved in the System Integration task force in 1992 and then taking responsibility for the integration project, Jean-Louis Renteux was well placed to give the audience the backstory to LSSIP.

In those days, Local Plans fed into the broader Convergence and Implementation Programme, which was similar in scope and structure to today’s Master Plan Level 3. As contact people from EUROCONTROL went to the States in person to explain requirements and gain understanding of local circumstances, this initiative was more successful than earlier attempts - such as the Common Medium Term Plan - had been, Jean-Louis Renteux explained.

Having the EUROCONTROL contact person and the relevant state bodies endorse and sign off the plan gave the entire process validity and authority: states were visibly committed to achieving the goals laid out in the plan.

Results were depicted in maps which showed which activities were complete, which were late and which were still in the planning stage. This overall view of ATM implementation planning in Europe was to become a useful building block in the European Single Sky initiative.

Speaking after Jean-Louis Renteux, Philippe Merlo, Director European Civil-Military Aviation, went on to say that most of the basic principles of LCIP are still there but they now have important additions.

The local monitoring process is integral to the overall European ATM Master Plan planning mechanism that begins with R&D and finishes with deployment.

There are many more bodies involved in ATM these days, including a number of European institutions. National stakeholders are involved now, not just state representatives.

The geographical scope has broadened: as a Comprehensive Agreement State of EUROCONTROL’s, Israel is taking part and has just finalised an LSSIP document.

Web-based tools are, of course, widely used today – when LCIP began in 1993, the internet was in its infancy with just five hundred servers online across the globe …

One important feature of the LSSIP process is that the documents are also used to report on ASBUs (Aviation System Block Upgrades) to ICAO. Consolidating ATM plan reporting in this way has relieved state authorities of an additional burden.

99 stakeholders from 39 European states and European institutions attended the LSSIP meeting and 25th anniversary celebration.

“The fact that so many stakeholders took time to come to this annual LSSIP event proves that the process is, even after 25 years of service, still very much fit for purpose.

“We are now working hard to adapt it to the new challenges – such as U-Space services monitoring -, ensuring that it evolves to a common reporting platform to unite European aviation,” commented Danny Debals, head of the PRM - planning, reporting and monitoring - unit responsible for the LSSIP process.

The annual Local Single Sky ImPlementation (LSSIP) documents lay out in detail the implementation plans and accomplishments for each ECAC State, as well as Israel, in the context of the European ATM Master Plan Level 3.

Based on these LSSIP documents, a Master Plan Level 3 Progress Report is produced every year, showing the progress of ATM implementation in Europe.