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The single European sky

Air transport contributes significantly to European economic growth and employment. As demand in air transport is constantly growing, developing an ecient air transport infrastructure in Europe is a priority for the European Union (EU). This is why the EU launched in 2004 the single European sky initiative, which aims to: restructure national airspaces with a consolidated air trac service provision; modernise air trac management (ATM) infrastructure in order to provide the required capacity that continuing trac growth entails.

SESAR: the single European sky ATM research programme

Signicant progress has been made in achieving the single European sky. However, with air trac volumes rising constantly and given the insucient capacity of the current ATM systems and increasing environmental consciousness, better technology and more harmonised procedures are needed to face the expected increased complexity and density of air trac. A capacity crunch can only be avoided through revolutionary technological innovation and the elimination of fragmentation. To achieve these objectives, the European Commission has launched an ambitious pan-European programme called SESAR: the technological dimension of the single European sky.

Over 17 million ights per year

12.5 million 10.5 million





SESAR: one programme for Europe

SESAR is a performance-driven programme built around the ATM stakeholders expectations for the new ATM system to be developed by 2020. SESAR brings a truly new approach to ATM modernisation through a coherent programme which will provide guidance and leadership to all ATM-related initiatives in Europe with a view to achieve global interoperability. The SESAR programme comprises three phases: The denition phase (2005-08) has produced the ATM master plan, which identies the technological steps and the modernisation priorities necessary for implementing a new ATM concept. The development phase (2008-13), managed by the SESAR Joint Undertaking , will develop the new equipment and standards to ensure, through the regulatory mechanisms of the single European sky, the replacement of the existing ground and airborne systems and interoperability with those outside Europe. The deployment phase (2014-20) will consist of large-scale production, procurement and implementation of the new ATM infrastructure and of the corresponding aircraft equipment.

Ambitious but realistic objectives

The ultimate goal of SESAR is to ensure sustainable air transport development in Europe in a safe and ecient manner through a performance-driven approach. The key performance targets are: enabling a three-fold increase in capacity; improving safety by a factor of 10; reducing by 10 % the environmental impact per ight; cutting ATM costs by 50 %.

Air transport employs 3.1 million people Trac reaches 30 000 ights per day during peak periods Air transport contributes EUR 220 billion to European gross domestic product

Air trac is growing by about 4-5 % a year

The SESAR concept

is the solution for achieving these objectives
Key to the SESAR concept is the business trajectory principle in which the users of the airspace and controllers dene together, through a collaborative process, the optimal ight path. Taking full advantage of both existing and newly developed technologies such as Galileo SESARs target concept relies on a number of new key features: the network operation plan, a dynamic rolling plan for continuous operations that ensures a common view of the network situation; full integration of airport operations as part of ATM and the planning process; trajectory management, reducing the constraints of airspace organisation to a minimum; new aircraft separation modes, allowing increased safety, capacity and eciency; system-wide information management, securely connecting all the ATM stakeholders which will share the same data; humans as the central decision-makers: controllers and pilots will be assisted by new automated functions to ease their workload and handle complex decision-making processes.

The SESAR Joint Undertaking

The SESAR Joint Undertaking, the rst European ATM publicprivate partnership, is the single managing entity for the SESAR development phase. The founding members of the SESAR Joint Undertaking are the European Community and Eurocontrol. Membership is open to public or private entities across the EU and in third countries. The Joint Undertakings mission is to execute the European ATM master plan by bringing together and managing public and private resources and by rationalising ATM-related research and development activities in Europe. Synergy with other projects such as the Clean Sky (www. cleansky.eu) and the US Federal Aviation Administrations NextGEN initiatives will ensure that there is a combined eort to reduce the impact of aviation on the environment and to promote the global interoperability of ATM systems. The estimated cost of the development phase is EUR 2.1 billion which shall be equally supported by the European Community, Eurocontrol and the ATM industry.

Aviation is estimated to account for 2 % of the worlds CO2 emissions ATM costs total EUR 7 billion per year

The shortcomings of the European ATM system are estimated to cost some EUR 4 billion: EUR 2 billion is attributed to fragmentation of the ATM network and its associated eect on productivity, EUR 1 billion to non-optimised ights and EUR 1 billion to delays


SESAR enjoys strong commitment from the European aviation community. With SESAR, Europe will not only have the safest and most modern ATM infrastructure in the world, but will also continue to be a leader in the wider aeronautics sector.

Practical information
Air transport portal of the European Commission: http://ec.europa.eu/transport/air_portal/sesame/index_en.htm Eurocontrol: http://www.eurocontrol.int/sesar/ SESAR Joint Undertaking: http://www.sesarju.eu

Photos courtesy of: iStockphoto - Naviair - Shutterstock.