Regional cooperation: BLUE MED and the EUROMED Project

08/11/2013

The EUROMED Programme and the BLUE MED Functional Airspace Block (FAB) project have wide commonalities in their objective of interfacing national and regional air navigation networks and in their common target of increasing the harmonization of their aviation standards.

It is obvious that interconnection between EUROMED and FAB BLUE MED, as well as with other regional initiatives like AEFMP, should play an important role in supporting the interfacing of the network, making best use of their respective resources and capabilities contributing to the development of a fruitful cooperation within the Mediterranean area.

BLUE MED FAB is an established Functional Airspace Block (FAB) with an ongoing Implementation Phase undertaken through a solid Implementation Programme, involving four European Countries (Cyprus, Greece, Italy and Malta). It is to be noted that Albania, Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon and the Kingdom of Jordan took part with the status of Observer or Associated Partner in the BLUE MED FAB Definition Phase.

Euromed Aviation II (EUROMED) is a Program funded by the European Commission promotes the emergence of a Euro-Mediterranean Common Aviation Area, and supports an open and secure aviation market in the Mediterranean Partner Countries with a view to further integrating it into the EU. It supports all Mediterranean partner countries to approximate the EU aviation acquis, while seeking to enhance cooperation among the partner countries themselves and facilitating the convergence of partner countries’ air traffic management systems with the Single European Sky legislation.

BLUE MED has identified a number of activities that will bring beneficial effects on how air traffic is managed all over the Mediterranean Area. The BLUE MED portfolio of initiatives spans from airspace and procedures design to Air Traffic Flow and Capacity Management, from Technical interoperability, Safety and Security Management, ANS Training, up to specific support on civil-military cooperation, environmental matters and a number of additional activities developed by the partnership. Moreover, BLUE MED used in the past with positive results both model based and real time simulation tools and facilities, thus allowing to identify tailored solutions on local issues rising and impacting the Mediterranean ATM operations. On the basis of the experience gathered and of the results achieved,

BLUE MED has developed an implementation programme for the ongoing Implementation Phase of the FAB. The Implementation Programme contains a number of activities being developed by all FAB Members. All single initiatives within the Implementation Programme also need to be extended beyond the European Union boundaries, thus enhancing their scope and increasing exponentially the benefits for the whole ATM community.

The experience gathered by BLUE MED in the area covered by its FAB can be used by the EUROMED Program in order to fulfil a number of needs from its Beneficiaries. BLUE MED proposes to study in common with EUROMED which technical support might be provided in specific domains and projects to be identified, at the same time satisfying the current and future EUROMED and BLUE MED current milestones in order to facilitate the identification, understanding and the implementation of technical procedures and practices of the European Aviation Area beyond the boundaries of the BLUE MED FAB.

Within the portfolio of activities that BLUE MED is bringing ahead, EUROMED and BLUE MED can identify a number of initiatives of interest for the EUROMED countries and start cooperation on the basis of clearly identified roadmaps with the non-EU countries concerned. According to the experiences and the requests received so far by both EUROMED and BLUE MED, the activities should as a minimum comprise airspace and procedures design, support to the airspace simulation, safety management and support on technical interoperability matters.

The identification of the relevant activities to be conducted in common could be the objective of an ad-hoc workshop that, making best use of the EUROMED facilities and BLUE MED expertise. This event could provide all interested non-EU stakeholders with valuable elements regarding potential practical elements that could be integrated in a common development roadmap encapsulated both within the EUROMED and the BLUE MED development programmes, with the objective to favour synergies of efforts while avoiding duplication.

For this purpose BLUE MED proposes to organise an initial EUROMED-BLUE MED conference early in 2014 in one of the EUROMED countries or during one of the international events planned in 2014 in order to identify and validate specific domains of interests where concrete actions could be commonly conducted in particular within the interoperability and airspace design domains.

Contacts: For BLUE MED
Mr Cristiano Cantoni - cristiano.cantoni@enav.it

Contacts: For EUROMED
Mr Gilles Fartek - gfk@integra.dk