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Report on Operations 29

Demonstration activities and other calls of the SESAR Joint
Undertaking

In the context of SESAR demonstration projects, ATC Full Datalink (AFD)
proposed the creation of an operative scenario for conducting a certain
number of commercial flights in European air space without voice radio
communication between controllers and pilots for all flight phases
between takeoff and landing. In short, all contacts for data exchange and
instructions for conducting the flight in the controlled air space take place
via the datalink (CPDLC/Controller Pilot Data Link Communication). Its
purpose was to demonstrate the ATM system’s technical capacity to
evolve toward the future SESAR operative concept, in which ground and
on-board systems exchange data without the controllers and flight crew
necessarily making contact via radio.

In this project, valued at approximately ¤3 million and 50% co-financed
by SESAR Joint Undertaking, ENAV coordinated a group of companies that
included NATS, Airbus, Boeing, easyJet, Air France, SAS, SITA, and Selex-
ES.

At the end of the test phase in the first 4 months of 2014, ENAV controllers
used the new system, installed in the Test and Training Room of the ACC
of Rome, to exchange flight instructions with pilots aboard a few actual
commercial flights. Specifically, ENAV conducted about fifty trial flights
operated by easyJet between Rome Fiumicino and Palermo, by Air France
for flights between Rome Fiumicino and Paris, and SAS flights between
Stockholm and Rome Fiumicino.

Also concluded in Fall 2014 was the WE-FREE demonstration project,
launched in 2012 with trials on connections with direct routes between
Italian and French cities on weekends.

Airlines were very interested in the results. In all, 125 target flights were
conducted on two weekends. The potential saving from the possibility of
using direct routes on weekends was calculated at 600 tonnes of fuel and
2000 tonnes of CO2 per year.

In response to the SESAR Joint Undertaking call aimed at demonstrating
integration of remotely piloted aircraft in non-segregated air spaces
entered by civil traffic and with pilots on board, ENAV participated in the
MeDALE (Mediterranean Detect & Avoid Live Exercise) project, begun
officially in September 2013. The simulation aimed to demonstrate the
possibility for remotely piloted aircraft to interact with normal air traffic,
thereby occupying non-segregated air space. Numerous industry experts
were greatly interested in the simulation.

The RACOON project, coordinated by ENAV for 2014-2016, aims to
demonstrate the benefits of remotely providing assistance services
to airport traffic. The project intends to demonstrate, in real operating
conditions, that combining the two concepts of Remote Tower and
Approach Procedure to vertical guidance can generate significant
performance benefits, maintaining the ATC service at a high level and