News

SEE FRA Expansion

Starting from 28th of January 2021 the Aircraft Operators are able to plan their flights freely across the airspace of Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia 24/7 without the limitations of the geographical boundaries. This represents a first expansion of the SEE FRA project (South East Europe Free Route Airspace, succesfully implemented on the 7th of November 2019), thus making possible cross border free route operations across the airspace of the 4 states. Therefore, SEE FRA becomes one of the largest free route airspace blocks in Europe.

The new flight planning rules significantly optimize the flight trajectories not only by using the shortest connections but also allowing the use of the most effective routings when the impacts on the flights are inevitable e.g adverse weather avoidance.

According to the simulations, SEE FRA contributes to a significant reduction of emissions and of millions of miles (NM) daily, from the total mileage.

The activities related to SEE FRA and national FRA projects are in accordance with Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) No 716/2014 which provides for the individual ANSPs to cooperate for the introduction of Free Route Airspace above FL310 throughout Europe by the end of 2021.

It should be acknowledged that the Network Manager has a central role as an enabler and driver of the airspace changes at European level. Thanks to the active involvement and full support of EUROCONTROL Member States and EUROCONTROL Agency, the Aircraft Operators will be able to fly on optimised profiles, using less fuel, hence reducing aviation´s environmental footprint.