ENAIRE holds a meeting with airline associations and the official college of pilots to prepare for the Summer Plan

At the request of ENAIRE, Spain's Air Navigation Manager, a meeting was held today with different airline associations (ALA, ACETA, AECA and IATA), the Official College of Pilots (COPAC), Aena, the General Civil Aviation Authority and the Spanish Aviation Safety Agency (AESA) to jointly deal with the progress of preparations for the Summer 19/20 Plan.

Air traffic continues to increase. According to ENAIRE's forecasts, their network expects 659,000 flights from June to August 2019, a 4.6% increase compared to the same period last year.

The Summer Plan includes numerous initiatives and measures on technical and operational sides, both nationally and internationally, as well as in terms of increasing the number of controllers.

Besides ALA, ACETA, AECA, IATA and COPAC, the meeting was also attended by representatives from AENA, AESA and the General Civil Aviation Authority

The aim is to approach the peak season under optimal air traffic management conditions and guarantee that the service is offered with absolute safety, capacity, efficiency, sustainability and quality.

As regards the measures proposed by EUROCONTROL to avoid congestion in certain Central European areas, Ángel Luis Arias, ENAIRE's CEO, pointed out that Spain "is part of the solution, not of the problem", appealing "to European solidarity and team spirit to lighten the burden caused by capacity and air traffic volume in other countries".

‘BCN A PUNT’ and Atenea

As for ENAIRE, transversal action plans have been put into operation for the entire network, specifically tailored to each of the company's five regions: Northern Central, Balearic Islands, Southern, Canary Islands and Eastern.

Most of the work focuses on Barcelona, where the Ministry of Public Works is driving the 'BCN A PUNT' initiative aimed at improving airport operations, as well as ENAIRE's Atenea office, whose goal is to maximise and optimise operations in El Prat in collaboration with Aena.

ENAIRE's CEO shared the main conclusions reached at the high-level meeting held on 7 February at Barcelona's Air Traffic Control Centre, at which EUROCONTROL's CEO and the CEO from DSNA, France's air navigation service provider, were also present.

All participants pledged to regularly track the progress of the Summer Plan in order to tackle the peak season under optimal conditions.

About ENAIRE

ENAIRE is the company belonging to the Public Works Department that handles air navigation in Spain. It renders aerodrome control services at 21 airports, including those with the most traffic.

In 2018 ENAIRE operated 2.1 million flights to and from four continents (Europe, America, Asia and Africa), transporting 300 million passengers.