Advanced Tower for an advanced airport!

Liege Airport is now certified as Advanced ATC Tower. This system allows better management of departures and arrivals and has several advantages for Airport operators.

We are proud to announce that Liege Airport (EBLG) was certified as Advanced ATC (Air Traffic Control) TWR airport by EUROCONTROL. Since Wednesday 10 March 2021 at 9h, the Airport Management System (AMS) of skeyes has started exchanging an extensive set of flight plan related data with the systems of EUROCONTROL NMOC (Network Manager Operations Centre).

After a period of trials in challenging times between Q2 2020 and Q1 2021, Liege Airport is now officially connected and integrated into the EUROCONTROL Network. Efficient exchange of flight plan data, particularly in critical or degraded scenarios, such as bad weather conditions, will greatly facilitate the work of the skeyes Air Traffic Controllers at Liege Airport. 

EUROCONTROL NMOC will consequently receive regular updates of the status of flights while aircraft are still on the ground. Exchanging relevant and accurate flight information in a timely manner will also help to improve the efficiency and resilience of the airport by optimizing the use of resources. At the same time, Liege Airport contributes to the improvement of predictability and planning of air traffic. 

Through the direct link between AMS and EUROCONTROLsystems, controllers will, in a second stage, be able to optimally manage the accuracy of flight plans via a set of additional features that will be added to their Airport Management System :

• ATFM (Air Traffic Flow Management) slot extensions requests
• FPL (Flight Plan) de-suspension requests
• New ATFM slots (CTOT – Calculated Take Off Time) requests
• Possibilities to automatically extend taxi times and ATFM slots in case of de-icing operations

Johan Decuyper, CEO skeyes: “Through among other things the continuous improvement of its AMS platform, skeyes further contributes to the development of Liege Airport. The achievement to become  Advanced ATC TWR airport is a next step in the realisation of our shared ambitions. skeyes will keep investing in future opportunities to improve our services to the airport community.”

On behalf of Liege Airport, CEO a.i. Frédéric Jacquet and Wim De Breucker, APOC manager & Advanced ATC TWR project lead, would like to thank the local team of skeyes for their important contribution to project. Special credit goes to François Claude and his skeyes IT team for all the technical development and testing work together with EUROCONTROL.