EUROCONTROL Maastricht Upper Area Control Centre (MUAC) offers a new service to airlines for environmentally more responsible routes

The service is a new addition to the Pre-Flight Check (PFC) process deployed three years ago, to improve punctuality and flight efficiency. The ECO Service targets all greenhouse gas emissions while also taking into account reserved airspace for military activities, network constraints and flight schedules. The environmental data is estimated by the Advanced Emissions Model (AEM) developed and maintained by EUROCONTROL’s Aviation Sustainability Unit in the EUROCONTROL Innovation Hub (Brétigny/ France). Through advanced algorithms, AEM processes flight trajectories on a flight-by-flight basis to estimate the amount of fuel burn and related exhaust emissions including carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, water vapour, the oxides of nitrogen and sulphur, unburnt hydrocarbons and particulate matters. This identifies the routes with a smaller environmental impact, enabling MUAC to propose these to participating airlines on a daily basis, taking care to exclude those that conflict with other network priorities. 

On top of more eco-friendly flight planning, enhanced data will help MUAC’s ambitions to enable air traffic controllers to offer more environmental trajectories during tactical flight phases. As it is important to know the arrival runway and the likelihood of that changing, a model to predict runway usage has been developed and, if this information is known six hours in advance, MUAC can propose a more optimal route. Air traffic controllers can then plan more efficient smooth descent paths in place of stepped operations for example, to reduce emissions. 

MUAC already identifies environmental opportunities not yet available to other stakeholders as a result of the existing collaborative network. Integration of civil and military operations at MUAC supports efficient cross-border civil-military services in the upper airspace of Germany and the Netherlands. “Contact with the military zones in our airspace is direct, either to the operations room or central supervisor,” explains John Santurbano. 

“Thanks to the Dutch Flexible Use of Airspace Cell based at MUAC and the direct link with the military authorities in Belgium and Germany, we immediately know when an area becomes available and can directly coordinate delivery of routes through these deactivated areas with the aircraft operators (both tactically and in the pre-flight phase). The direct contact enables adjustment of their flight plan according to the latest situation which results in cost and environmental benefits.”