ICAOs 40th triennial Assembly

24 September 2019, Montreal

The 40th Assembly was opened by ICAO President Dr Benard Aliu by welcoming around 2500 participants, a new record on attendance. This 40th Assembly takes place in the year of the 75th anniversary of ICAO, a specialised agency of the United Nations, and focus on the five strategic objectives: Safety, Capacity and Efficiency, Security and Facilitation, Economic development as well as Environmental protection.

EUROCAE, as an ICAO recognised international organisation as well as a recognised Standard Developing Organisation (SDO) and therefore with an official observer status, is participating and focusing on the Technical Commission and some specific items of the Executive Commission.

On Friday the climate protest with more than 300.000 participants took

place in Montreal and was led by the Swedish teenage activist Greta Thunberg, who was also invited by the ICAO Secretary General Dr Fang Liu for a bilateral meeting, just the day before the environment agenda items were scheduled. The protest forced ICAO to close on Friday and to defer the Assembly agenda items from Friday to Saturday and Sunday.

Commercial flying currently accounts for around 2,5% of the global carbon emissions, EUROCAE has just recently expanded its activities to address in the future more and better environmentally friendly solutions in aviation to reach European,  international and industry set targets to further reduce CO2 emissions as well as other environmental objectives.

ICAO Standards Round Table Meeting#5

25 September 2019, Montreal

EUROCAE as one of the core members of the ICAO Standards Round Table (SRT) participated at the 5th meeting, which took place during the ICAO 40th General Assembly. The meeting was chaired by the Director Air Navigation Bureau (D/ANB), Steve Creamer, and attended by 5 Standard Developing Organisations (SDOs): Arinc, OCG, RTCA, SAE and EUROCAE, the president of the Air Navigation Commission (ANC), several technical officers of the ICAO ANB secretariat, the FAA, Japan Civil Aviation Bureau (JCAB), EASA and the European Commission, as well as SJU and EUROCONTROL.

The meeting made very good progress, after we agreed at the 4th meeting on the TORs and went this time into more details on how and where we can complement each others work. All the SDOs presented their current and partly future work programme and included potential candidates (industry standards) or areas, where we see that ICAO can make good use of SDO products or vice versa. This comes well in time to support ICAO under their current budgetary constraints and put our standard developing activities in closer coordination with ICAO panels for a permanent liaison on secretariat level to allow for information, ideas and plans to be exchanged.

Strategically we will work on a common standardisation roadmap, taking each other’s planned activities into account on a very early stage of the process. While the SRTM is the forum for exchanges on the strategic views of the organisations, more

Photo by Paul Bosman

systematic interactions are required. In recent times new SDO activities have been setup on matters of interest for ICAO with the focus to maximise the possibilities for work programme alignment, potential future referencing, and cross participation.

A second, joint proposal was brought forward by the European Commission, EASA, EUROCONTROL
and EUROCAE, with the buy in of the FAA. This proposal refers to programmes (national or regional) linked or harmonised with ICAO GANP and GASP elements. If there are potential programmes where procedures are already operationally validated, available in packages enabling implementation concepts of operations as well as proposals for drafts SARPs or other ICAO provisions, this can be brought forward to ICAO and entered directly into the SARP developing process at ICAO. The proposal built on the ICAO “camera ready” concept and was therefore well received and widely accepted so the ICAO secretariat will now work on the necessary internal procedures to facilitate validated inputs from existing programmes.

In summary, it was an extremely positive step forward, on European level we have demonstrated how constructive and effective the
partnership between EC, EASA, EUROCONTROL and EUROCAE is, bringing concrete solutions, supporting and serving ICAO and its member states globally in this collaborative way under the SRT.

2019 EUROCAE Leadership Summit

3 September 2019, Saint-Denis

The 2019 Leadership Summit meeting was attended by 23 participants representing over a third of the Working Groups (WGs), both Chairs and Secretaries, with the participation of the TAC Chair, and the EUROCAE Secretariat.

Christian Schleifer, EUROCAE Secretary General, opened the business by stressing the key elements defining EUROCAE strategy as a membership organisation, the growth and ascending evolution over the past years, and the benefits of the new EUROCAE location.

Amongst the updates presented, the Secretariat introduced the new processes introduced at EUROCAE, the QMS status, while stressing the importance of the increased cooperation and collaboration with the partner organisations and the members' demands for additional standards.

Eric Bouchard, the Chair of the EUROCAE Technical Advisory Committee (TAC), conveyed the “message from the TAC” aiming at improving the overall efficiency of the organisation by a better communication between WGs and TAC. He reiterated the TAC role, which is to advise the Council on technical, operational and, on request, policy matters, while providing recommendations to the Council on the creation and modification of new standardisation activities.

The discussion steered towards the challenges and best practices in WG management, how to best manage joint activities and how to best interface between groups while staying up to date with other WG’s developments.

The meeting ended on a positive note with the commitment of the participants to continuing this fruitful activity next year.

WG-59 Flight Object Interoperability

5 September 2019, Saint-Denis

On 05 September 2019 Working Group 59 met after a long break again face to face at the EUROCAE offices at Saint Denis. This “Kick Off” meeting marked the beginning of the work on a revision of ED-133 “Flight Object Interoperability Specification”.

The work of WG-59 is based on documents that were developed by the SESAR Joint Undertaking (SJU) containing technical and operational requirements for the exchange of Flight Plan information (the “Flight Object”) between users such as Air Traffic Control centers. In line with the current Terms of Reference, the publication of the updated 

document is scheduled for middle of 2021.
The very challenging timeline requires the cooperation of experts with both, technical and operational background. It is expected to be one of the major standards for the improvement of future aviation and a facilitator for interoperability between the various Air Navigation Service Providers.

In case you are interested in contributing to this development please contact Alexander Engel, 
at alexander.engel@eurocae.net.

Kick off meeting:
EUROCAE WG-104
SWIM

16 September 2019, Brussels

EUROCAE has produced a number of deliverables in support of SWIM implementation in Europe, including a specification for an AMAN extended Horizon SWIM Information Service, a template for future SWIM information service standardisation within EUROCAE and a list of potential SWIM information services to be standardised by EUROCAE.

WG-104 closely coordinates with the INEA/CEF Implementation Project on SWIM Governance and with EUROCONTROL ensuring the compliance of the EUROCAE deliverables with the EUROCONTROL Specifications on SWIM.

The kick-off meeting for the re-launched activities under WG-104

took place on 16 September at EUROCONTROL premises. 23 participants registered to work together towards the completion of the following deliverables:

• SWIM Information Service Specification Template and Methodology (Technical Standard)
• Intermediate Report on the Activities undertaken by WG-104
• Final Report on the Activities undertaken by WG-104.

For any additional information please contact Adrian Cioranu at adrian.cioranu@eurocae.net

WG-112 VTOL

25 September 2019, Bruchsal

WG-112 held its second plenary meeting on 25 September 2019, in Bruchsal (Germany), hosted by Volocopter.

The meeting brought together more than 50 participants from the industry, authorities and other stakeholders.

The main focus of the meeting was to review the progress of the various activities and it provided a very good opportunity for direct interaction, exchange and discussion within and across the different subgroups.

WG-112 is working in 5 subgroups:

• SG-1 Electrical
• SG-2 Lift – Thrust
• SG-3 Safety
• SG-4 Flight
• SG-5 Ground

In addition, a more general CONOPS is being developed at the plenary level.

Overall, good progress was reported

and the subgroups will further develop and draft the deliverables.

The Steering Committee met on 24 September 2019. It continues to monitor and coordinate the various SGs and maintains an overarching view of the activity, progress and link with EASA.

In order to achieve the ambitious timeframe needed for the standards to be available to support the EASA Special Condition on VTOL, it is expected that the first wave of deliverables will become available towards the end of 2019/beginning of 2020.

The next meeting of WG-112 will take place on 4 December 2019, at Suresnes (Paris area), hosted by FlyingWhales.

For further information or to participate, please contact Sebastian Reschenhofer at sebastian.reschenhofer@eurocae.net

79th meeting of EUROCAE TAC  

19-20 September, Brussels

The 79th meeting of the EUROCAE Technical Advisory Committee took place at the EASA premises in Brussels.

TAC approved new and updated Task Sheets for several WGs and activities:

• WG-98 Aircraft Emergency Locator Transmitters

A new deliverable was added to draft a change to the ED-62B MOPS for Aircraft Emergency Locator Transmitters 406 MHz. 

Industry and regulatory groups continue to evolve on the technologies related to ELTs and the infrastructure for search and rescue.

After the publication of ED-62B, a number of change requests were submitted to address errata and changes to the document.

To properly disposition these comments Change 1 will be developed. The work will be carried out jointly with RTCA SC-229.

• WG-80 Hydrogen Fuel Cells

WG-80 is working to develop guidelines and collect best practices to support qualification and certification of Hydrogen Fuel Cell Systems in the various intended applications for aerospace vehicles.

The objective is to look into recommendations, to collect best practices, and to develop guidelines.

Performance requirements such as power and reliability are outside the scope of this working group.

TAC approved the addition of a new deliverable: MASPS for Liquid Hydrogen fuel cells on-board aircraft, expected in 2021.

• WG-83 Airport Foreign Object Detection Systems

WG-83 is tasked with developing guidance documents supporting airports implement systems that deal with FOD detection. 

After releasing ED-235 “Minimum Aviation System Performance Specification for Foreign Object Debris Detection System” in 2017, the Working Group 83 is working on the definition of the associated OSED in order to help airports to define their CONOPS using a FOD detection system.
The Task Sheet was updated to take into account the current status of the work and expected date of publication of the OSED (2020).

• WG-108 ATN/IPS

Following the publication of ED-262 Technical Standard of Aviation Profiles for ATN/IPS, the TAC approved the addition of a new task to maintain ED-262 consistent with the definition of ATN/IPS done at ICAO level and with the related standards from AEEC as well as a slight delay on the work on the MASPS on ATN-IPS end-to-end interoperability and certification, now expected in mid-2020. The work on both tasks is carried out jointly with RTCA SC-223.

Next TAC meetings are planned as follows:

• TAC#80 15-16 January 2020, EASA, Cologne
• TAC#81 28 April 2020, IATA, Geneva

For additional information, please contact Anna von Groote at anna.vongroote@eurocae.net

SWIM Service Implementation Workshop

9-11 December 2019, Brussels

EUROCONTROL is organising on 9-11 December 2019 at the HQ in Brussels a workshop to support the implementation of SWIM Information Services.

The objective of the workshop is to share experience and demonstrate SWIM service implementations, including the application of the following documents:

• EUROCONTROL SWIM specifications, and
• EUROCAE ED-254 “Arrival Sequence Service Performance Standard”.

The workshop will focus on the following topics:

• Operational and prospective SWIM Information Services in all ATM domains (airports, ANSPs, the military, MET, the network, etc.
• Development of SWIM Information Services applying the SWIM specifications
• SWIM technical infrastructure
• Provision of ATM data services as SWIM Information Services

We encourage you to register online:

For additional information, please contact us at swim@eurocontrol.int.

Aviation Software Standards

With airborne and ground-based aviation systems increasingly interconnected, the landscape for critical systems software is changing.

Whether you are an ANSP specifying or accepting a system, the person responsible for system maintenance, or a supplier at the cutting edge of software product development, you will need to understand the standards options available to you, how to apply them, and the impact on costs.  

Join our next training session of Aviation Software Standards, based on your availability, and experience a practical and interactive approach to the subject matter, drawing on the trainers’ extensive experience in both aviation safety and critical systems software development. 

The course outline is available here.

The next sessions are planned as follows:  

For any additional information please contact Adrian Cioranu at adrian.cioranu@eurocae.net. 

Aviation Cybersecurity Training 

Benefits of attending

• Participants will gain access to the tools and understanding to use available standards to manage cyber risk in an aviation context in a standards-led way.
• ED-201 brought to life with classroom scenarios and exercises.
• Learn best practice on auditing and certification.
• Instructor a leading authority on aviation cybersecurity and a certified lead auditor for ISO27001.
• Sharing experiences with colleagues from other aviation stakeholders/countries.
• Extensive course handouts including ED-201, ED-202, ED-203A, ED-204, ED-205.
• Ideal learning environment at EUROCAE HQ in Saint-Denis (Paris area, France).
• Certificate on completion of the course.

The next sessions are planned as follows:  

The course outline is available here.

For any additional information please contact Adrian Cioranu at adrian.cioranu@eurocae.net. 

EUROCAE documents

The following EUROCAE documents were published in September:

ED-194A Change 2 "Minimum Operational Performance Standards (MOPS) for Aircraft Surveillance Applications (ASA) System"

ED-120 Change 3 "Safety and Performance Standard for Air Traffic Data Link Services in Continental Airspace"

ED-262 "Technical Standard of Aviation Profiles for ATN/IPS"

ED-256 Change 1 "MOPS for ACAS Xa with ACAS Xo functionality"

All EUROCAE publications are accessible by clicking the button:

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