FABEC: Cooperation agreement on basic training for air traffic controllers

This Cooperation Agreement ranges from jointly providing ATCO Basic Training to the contracting parties in compliance with their common objectives and requirements in terms of content and quality, to coordinating available training capacity as well as to continuously improving the use of existing resources throughout FABEC. Additionally, a FABEC common basic course is developed to enable the flexible allocation of ATCO trainees within FABEC according to the system's capacity. The joint provision of basic training courses will allow all participating partners to gain valuable experience in the future training provision within FABEC. This network's training organisations are now initiating a detailed planning for the training provision in each of the FABEC ANSPs as of 2011 by nominating the executing training entities and allocating the respective demand. This agreement is a first sustainable step in the evolution of training cooperation within FABEC. Studies are also being conducted in common in the domains of recruitment & selection, unit training for ATCOs and training for air traffic safety electronics personnel (ATSEP). Following first benefits in airspace structuring and routing, the FABEC initiative now also shows effects on the level of training service provision. FABEC brings together the six States of Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland, their civil and military air navigation service providers as well as EUROCONTROL's four-State air traffic control centre in Maastricht. The civil FABEC ANSPs employ a total of 17,700 people. 5,400 are traffic controllers. 55 % of all European traffic takes place in the FABEC area.