DAVID LEARMOUNT / LONDON

Eurocontrol's supreme body will rule this week that continent is ready for tighter vertical traffic spacing in 2002

The council of European air navigation organisation Eurocontrol is expected to formalise the decision to introduce reduced vertical separation minima (RVSM) across Europe from 24 January 2002 at its meeting on 12-13 July.

Approval would mean that from next January traffic in the RVSM band - flight level 290 to FL410 (29,000-41,000ft/8,840m-12,500m) - will be separated by 1,000ft vertically instead of 2,000ft. Eurocontrol anticipates that this will increase the band's traffic capacity by up to 25% by about 2004 when the system matures.

Despite four participating countries not having met all the technical and operational conditions, Eurocontrol is convinced that they will have by the end of September when the final assessment of the shape of the RVSM block of nations will be defined, according to the organisation's senior RVSM programme manager Joe Sultana.

Also, the UK's 19 April introduction of RVSM for equipped aircraft in its airspace has proved a success, says Sultana, with the controllers reporting that they are finding the transition manageable (Flight International, 24-30 April).

The states which have failed so far to pass Eurocontrol's tests for RVSM competency are Denmark, Latvia, Moldova and Morocco. Denmark has yet to reach a satisfactory civil/military air traffic services agreement about how its RVSM-exempted military aircraft will be handled without being put at a disadvantage, and Latvia has not yet completed arrangements for interfacing with Russia, which uses metric altitudes and where flight levels in the RVSM band are separated by 500m vertically.

When RVSM goes live in January the participating airspace block will extend from Morocco over Europe to the border of the Russian Federation, and is now expected to include late applicant Belarus.

The final go/no go decision, which has moved from July back to the original late September deadline to allow the monitoring of more aircraft for height-keeping accuracy, will not need to involve the Council, says Sultana.

The fact that the military in all states are being given longer to comply is not a great problem, he adds. Eurocontrol observations have determined that military use of the RVSM band constitutes less than 1% of traffic, especially since the US Air Force has already begun equipping for RVSM. Meanwhile, Sultana says, old aircraft not suitable for RVSM upgrade are being forced out of the civil fleet anyway because of the March 2002 final global deadline for the phasing out of Chapter 2.

Source: Flight International