The CANSO Mombasa ATFM Roadmap is a milestone on the path to greater efficiency in African air traffic management.
Airspace Article
These phases should be thought of as a continuous planning, action and review cycle that is fully integrated with the ATM planning and post-operations processes.
Africa aims to achieve a seamless sky. The platform for this ambition is air traffic flow management (ATFM). And the key to ATFM is collaborative decision making (CDM).
Boni Dibate, CANSO’s Director of Africa Affairs reports that CDM encourages “the sharing of all relevant information among decision-makers and supports ongoing dialogue between the various stakeholders throughout all phases of flight”.
Collaborative ATFM in Africa is based on the CANSO Mombasa ATFM Roadmap.
The initiative began in 2018 and will ensure efficient traffic flows and bring greater resilience in the face of service disruption. It is a key enabler for safety, efficiency, cost-effectiveness and environmental mitigation in Africa.
Importantly, the roadmap will balance the demands of airspace users against airspace and airport capacity and so maximise scarce ATM resources. The data generated will also inform other ATM developments and identify trends, especially as systems and processes mature.
The Mombasa Roadmap establishes a series of steps that will take an ANSP from an initial discussion to a post-implementation analysis.
How to achieve the roadmap
“Aviation is an ecosystem, and to truly transform our industry, we must all work together to combine and harmonise our efforts to boost performance, ensure smooth restart and recovery and shape future skies.”
Boni Dibate, CANSO’s Director of Africa Affairs
1.
Project management should clearly define the tasks for each stakeholder and contain targets along the road to implementation
2.
ANSPs should oversee the implementation process in collaboration with the relevant oversight authorities
3.
The personnel who will lead the development of ATFM should be identified. Best practices indicate that the ANSP usually takes the lead, but key stakeholders should be involved in the planning, development and implementation of ATFM.
The initial steps follow ICAO recommendations:
Accurately establishing capacity and demand is vital when an organisation starts its ATFM journey. Taken together, these two factors allow an ANSP to determine appropriate ATFM tools.
These tools can then be incorporated within a regional framework, a process that naturally means cooperating with neighbouring countries. A gap analysis will reveal how existing arrangements and processes stack up against the agreed requirements for an ATFM service.
Throughout it may be wise to employ a flow management specialist (FMP) to agree flow principles and measures with his or her counterparts. Training requirements will also need to be defined to ensure skills are constantly updated while Letters of Agreement and/or Memorandums of Understanding will only come into play as implementation nears.
The initial steps follow ICAO recommendations:
How to achieve the roadmap
Airspace Article
CANSO Africa will be undertaking the following SWIM activities to support SWIM implementation in the Africa region:
Conducting a SWIM implementation gap analysis
Developing a stakeholder engagement plan
Preparing a CANSO Africa SWIM implementation plan and strategie
Reviewing the ICAO SWIM implementation plan and timelines
CANSO work in Africa
The Mombasa Roadmap is far from the only work CANSO is doing in Africa. “While it’s fair to say the industry still faces many pandemic-related challenges, I am amazed by how much our industry and regional community have achieved this past year,” says Dibate. “The traffic picture is uncertain but the Africa region is putting in place a number of key initiatives that will both strengthen our resiliency and help us carve a new path for the future.”
CANSO’s work in Africa includes system-wide information management (SWIM) and takes into account not only the organisation’s strategic framework and vision but also ICAO’s Global Air Navigation Plan and the recommendations of the Africa-Indian Ocean (AFI) Planning and Implementation Regional Group (APIRG).
Recently, CANSO Africa presented to the APIRG. CANSO has also held two webinars on the implementation of SWIM with a range of expert speakers.
The sharing of knowledge, expertise and innovation is in alignment with the ICAO initiative of “No Country left Behind”.
Beyond SWIM, the CANSO Africa ATM Safety Peer Review Initiative brings ANSPs together to review and improve safety management systems using the CANSO Standard of Excellence (SoE) in Safety Management Systems.
CANSO Africa is also working on increasing awareness of the Global Reporting Format (GRF) to ensure safety improvements in the region and is additionally furthering efforts in ICAO’s Aviation System Block Upgrades.
Advancing efforts to accommodate drones is also high on the agenda. Global best practice will need to be integrated into African skies, which will take extensive collaboration.
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The CANSO Mombasa ATFM Roadmap is a milestone on the path to greater efficiency in African air traffic management.
Airspace Article
The initial steps follow ICAO recommendations:
Africa aims to achieve a seamless sky. The platform for this ambition is air traffic flow management (ATFM). And the key to ATFM is collaborative decision making (CDM).
The Mombasa Roadmap establishes a series of steps that will take an ANSP from an initial discussion to a post-implementation analysis.
How to achieve the roadmap
“Aviation is an ecosystem, and to truly transform our industry, we must all work together to combine and harmonise our efforts to boost performance, ensure smooth restart and recovery and shape future skies.”
Boni Dibate, CANSO’s Director of Africa Affairs
Other important lessons from the pandemic include:
1.
Project management should clearly define the tasks for each stakeholder and contain targets along the road to implementation
2.
ANSPs should oversee the implementation process in collaboration with the relevant oversight authorities
3.
The personnel who will lead the development of ATFM should be identified. Best practices indicate that the ANSP usually takes the lead, but key stakeholders should be involved in the planning, development and implementation of ATFM.
Accurately establishing capacity and demand is vital when an organisation starts its ATFM journey. Taken together, these two factors allow an ANSP to determine appropriate ATFM tools.
These tools can then be incorporated within a regional framework, a process that naturally means cooperating with neighbouring countries. A gap analysis will reveal how existing arrangements and processes stack up against the agreed requirements for an ATFM service.
Throughout it may be wise to employ a flow management specialist (FMP) to agree flow principles and measures with his or her counterparts. Training requirements will also need to be defined to ensure skills are constantly updated while Letters of Agreement and/or Memorandums of Understanding will only come into play as implementation nears.
How to achieve the roadmap
Airspace Article
These phases should be thought of as a continuous planning, action and review cycle that is fully integrated with the ATM planning and post-operations processes.
CANSO work in Africa
The Mombasa Roadmap is far from the only work CANSO is doing in Africa. “While it’s fair to say the industry still faces many pandemic-related challenges, I am amazed by how much our industry and regional community have achieved this past year,” says Dibate. “The traffic picture is uncertain but the Africa region is putting in place a number of key initiatives that will both strengthen our resiliency and help us carve a new path for the future.”
CANSO’s work in Africa includes system-wide information management (SWIM) and takes into account not only the organisation’s strategic framework and vision but also ICAO’s Global Air Navigation Plan and the recommendations of the Africa-Indian Ocean (AFI) Planning and Implementation Regional Group (APIRG).
Recently, CANSO Africa presented to the APIRG. CANSO has also held two webinars on the implementation of SWIM with a range of expert speakers.
CANSO Africa will be undertaking the following SWIM activities to support SWIM implementation in the Africa region:
Reviewing the ICAO SWIM implementation plan and timelines
Preparing a CANSO Africa SWIM implementation plan and strategie
Developing a stakeholder engagement plan
Conducting a SWIM implementation gap analysis
The sharing of knowledge, expertise and innovation is in alignment with the ICAO initiative of “No Country left Behind”.
Beyond SWIM, the CANSO Africa ATM Safety Peer Review Initiative brings ANSPs together to review and improve safety management systems using the CANSO Standard of Excellence (SoE) in Safety Management Systems.
CANSO Africa is also working on increasing awareness of the Global Reporting Format (GRF) to ensure safety improvements in the region and is additionally furthering efforts in ICAO’s Aviation System Block Upgrades.
Advancing efforts to accommodate drones is also high on the agenda. Global best practice will need to be integrated into African skies, which will take extensive collaboration.
Boni Dibate, CANSO’s Director of Africa Affairs reports that CDM encourages “the sharing of all relevant information among decision-makers and supports ongoing dialogue between the various stakeholders throughout all phases of flight”.
Collaborative ATFM in Africa is based on the CANSO Mombasa ATFM Roadmap.
The initiative began in 2018 and will ensure efficient traffic flows and bring greater resilience in the face of service disruption. It is a key enabler for safety, efficiency, cost-effectiveness and environmental mitigation in Africa.
Importantly, the roadmap will balance the demands of airspace users against airspace and airport capacity and so maximise scarce ATM resources. The data generated will also inform other ATM developments and identify trends, especially as systems and processes mature.