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Open Sesame
The vice president of the European Commission and the director general of Eurocontrol didn’t look like Ali Baba and the Forty thieves yesterday, but they invoked the powerful word in that story — Sesame — as they launched the key program with that name.
In the story, Sesame opens doors to a treasure. With a little luck, the European version of Sesame will also exercise a lot of leverage and modernize the air traffic management system just in time to avoid gridlock between now and 2020. European Commission vp Jacques Barrot and Eurocontrol director general Victor Aguardo think that the Single European Sky Implementation Program (Sesame) can get the job done.
Barrot and Aguardo came to the Paris Air Show this week to announce the team of 29 organizations that will work on the “definition phase” of Sesame over the next two years. In addition, Aguardo says he and FAA Administrator Marion Blakey signed an accord on June 10 to harmonize the Sesame plan with a Next Generation Air Traffic System (NGATS) makeover of the U.S. system being led by the FAA. Eurocontrol and the FAA is also cooperating on bottom-up issues such as which data link to use in their modernized ATM systems.
The group of 29 organizations that will devise the Sesame master plan over 24 months introduced itself yesterday. The group is led by the Air Traffic Alliance (EADS, Airbus and Thales). And it includes Boeing which, like Airbus, wants to see only one set of avionics required for an airline aircraft to operate on either side of the Atlantic, not two. Now that the team has been selected, it is negotiating a contract with Eurocontrol. It is not clear if there were any other bidders for the definition phase work, but it seems implausible that one headed by EADS, Airbus and Thales had any chance of losing.
The new group heading Sesame is actually a consortium of four consortia. These include:
(1) Airspace users, including three airlines and four associations representing other types of users.
(2) 10 air navigation service providers
(3) Five airports
(4) Suppliers — seven manufacturers.
Olaf Dlugi, an advisor to the head of the European Regions Airline Association, has been selected to lead the executive commission being created to oversee the Sesame effort.
The Sesame contract calls for spending 60 million euros over two years, but some of that will be spent internally by Eurocontrol. Eurocontrol is already spending 150 million euros per year on ATM modernization research and development. Once Sesame enters the implementation phase in 2007, the European Commission and Eurocontrol plan to spend 300 million per year on it, sharing the costs 50/50.
Dlugi says the Sesame group will have several milestones to meet by 2007, including deciding on a new ATM concept of operations and developing an ATM master plan. —David Hughes
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