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

Since COOPANS was set up in 2006, the partners have been cooperating on the joint development, upgrading and harmonisation of their ATM systems. The systems now use common software and the maintenance processes have been harmonised. As a result, seven control centres in Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, Austria and Croatia have now been harmonised. 

The seven control centres undergo synchronised upgrading twice a year. In 2015, these upgrades took place over a two-week period per upgrade without any delays or other inconvenience to air traffic. We also expect periodical future system upgrades to be implemented without any negative impact on air traffic. This is a unique development in European ATM, where the ANSPs in the other countries are still running their control centres with individual, technically very diverse systems.

In addition, in COOPANS we are harmonising operational and technical procedures in order to limit specific and individual functionalities at the various ANSPs.

We estimate that we cut our system development costs by at least 30 per cent 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. In 2015, the COOPANS cooperation was extended, becoming the COOPANS Alliance, which, besides technical-operational cooperation, now also includes a common approach to and participation in SESAR 2020, SESAR Deployment Manager, EU funding projects, and the A6 Alliance in which COOPANS Alliance participates on an equal footing with the five largest ANSPs in Europe. Through

these alliances, we are making our mark on the development in Europe.

Together with the other partners in the COOPANS Alliance, we have taken the lead in the matter of implementing EU requirements for the harmonisation of ATM.

>>> Read more about COOPANS at www.coopans.com  

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.