COOPANS

COOPANS is an international partnership consisting of Naviair, the Irish Aviation Authority, LFV, Austro Control, Croatia Control and NAV Portugal.

The COOPANS partners are the first to work on jointly standardising and harmonising the technical equipment used for ATM, and ATM systems in their control centres have been fully harmonised since 2015. NAV Portugal, the newest member of COOPANS, expects to become operational with a COOPANS ATM system in the course of 2022. This is a unique development in European ATM, where the ANSPs in the other countries are still running their ATCCs with individual, technically very diverse systems.

We estimate that we cut our system development costs considerably compared with the costs each partner would incur if we had to develop the technology independently. To this should be added our considerable savings in operating expenses as a result of joint work concepts and exchange of experience.

The COOPANS cooperation includes a common approach to and participation in SESAR. SESAR is the EU research and development programme. Its objective is to modernise European ATM. SESAR is based on the Single European Sky regulations, which form the legal basis for the Single European Sky ATM Research programme (SESAR). This means that SESAR is the technological approach to testing and finding solutions that can achieve the SES targets. The programme is managed by SESAR Joint Undertaking and has been running since the approval of the first version of the European ATM Master Plan in 2009.

The COOPANS collaboration is large enough and has sufficient resources to be able to establish a common approach and help members to update to meet the latest requirements and coming conditions – and to influence our European environment.

COOPANS & SESAR: Through SESAR, Naviair is putting its stamp on the definition of the future European ATM systems, applying the philosophy already underpinning the COOPANS systems.