New milestone achieved: seamless free route operations in Northern Europe

As of June 23 airspace users see a seamless Free Route Airspace across NEFAB East (Estonia, Finland, and Latvia) and DK/SE FAB (Denmark and Sweden), enabling to plan and fly user preferred trajectories across these five states without boundaries.

This development builds on the earlier implementation of Free Route Airspace in DK/SE FAB and NEFAB and is the next step in optimizing flight operations in a large volume of airspace, expected to provide operational, environmental and cost benefits for airspace users. The FRA concept will also increase the compatibility between the flight plan and the trajectory flown, hence increasing the predictability for a given flight.

In the next steps, the seamless Free Route Airspace area will expand with erasing remaining borders with Norway and will continue further on with connecting to the Free Route Airspace in the UK, Ireland, and Iceland within the Borealis FRA programme. The concept removing boundaries between FRA in a large area in Northern Europe by 2021 will demonstrate how impressive the effects of free route operations are.

Cross-border Free Route operations are a significant initiative in delivering the European Commission’s vision of a Single European Sky, catering for less fragmented and more efficient ATM in Europe.

Picture: Network Static Map on EUROCONTROL NOP showing the cross border FRA between DK-SE FAB and NEFAB on June 23