Skyguide
The benefits here include increased heads-up time, shorter and safe handovers as well as providing voice traffic with additional digital support.
The Virtual Centre model promises substantial benefits in terms of operational flexibility, business continuity and cost-effective technical evolution.
This, in turn, offers several further benefits, with the promise of more efficient air traffic handling, lower fuel consumption, fewer pollutant emissions and less noise, too.
Skyguide maintains further operations at Bern (Belp), Buochs, Grenchen, Lugano (Agno) and St. Gallen-Altenrhein regional airports and at numerous all-military or joint civil/military airfields.
And one prerequisite for this – in addition to tailoring airways more closely to users' requirements rather than basing them on national borders – is the creation of a series of large integrated airspace blocks.
The six FABEC member states – Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland – signed the corresponding international agreement in December 2010, laying the legal foundation for the new airspace entity.
Skyguide traces its origins back to 1922, when, after the First World War had demonstrated the importance of telecommunications, Switzerland concluded an agreement with the Marconi company.
Only on 21 December 1948, after concluding an agreement under which the Confederation and the country's airports would bear the costs of air navigation services, did Radio Schweiz start to monitor Swiss airspace.
[11] On 1 January 1989, Radio Schweiz's air navigation activities were restructured and brought into the new Swisscontrol company, whose headquarters were in Bern.
At the beginning of 2001, military air navigation services, which had been provided separately until then, were also placed under the responsibility of Swisscontrol, which was renamed skyguide in the process.
On 1 July 2002, a Tupolev Tu-154 of BAL Bashkirian Airlines of the Republic of Bashkortostan in Russia and a Boeing 757 of DHL Express collided in Überlingen near the German-Swiss border at an altitude of 12,000 metres in skyguide-controlled Southern German airspace.
On 24 February 2004, Peter Nielsen, the air traffic controller who had been on duty at the time, was stabbed to death by Vitaly Kaloyev, who had lost his wife and two children in the accident.
[14] On 15 March 2006, skyguide was adjudged to have not met the requirements for operating a single control centre for Switzerland's upper airspace.
On 20 December 2006, the Swiss Federal Office of Civil Aviation (FOCA) awarded skyguide its certification for the Single European Sky (SES).
