More on-time flights, reduction of taxiing time, fuel consumption and exhaust emissions under control: these are the advantages of the new platform.

After a year of trials and thanks to the support of Alitalia, the process of integration between ADR and ENAV in the use of A-CDM (Airport Collaborative Decision Making) procedure at “Leonardo da Vinci” airport in Roma-Fiumicino begins today.

With the adoption of the A-CDM platform, Italy’s main airport can now send information on the state of all departing flights to the Network Management Operations Centre at Eurocontrol, who will sort and send on to the other connected airports, thus significantly optimizing overall operative time. As of today there are only ten airports in Europe which have this system available: apart from Leonardo da Vinci – the first Italian airport to take part in the European project – there is also Munich, Brussels, Paris CDG, Frankfurt, London, Dusseldorf, Zurich, Oslo and Helsinki.

The experimental phase of A-CDM, which began in October 2012, has already allowed the airline companies to save an average of 800 minutes of taxiing operations a day, equivalent to 9,600 kg of fuel. That means that during this period the carriers have saved a massive 3.1 million Euro in fuel.

Thanks to the A-CDM, all the various stages of a flight, from the flight plan to the airport operations, from take off to the route and on to the next landing, with the relative turn-round, will all be considered a “single process” which connects the arriving flight to the departure flight, allowing the optimization of air traffic management and of all the operations of assistance. This will be achieved through the constant exchange of information among the operators involved in the programme, which is updated in real time. The common platform therefore increases efficiency and punctuality through an improvement to the flow of air traffic and the management of airport capacity, reducing delays to a minimum, improving forecasts of events and optimizing the use of resources.

This has been made possible thanks to the close collaboration between Aeroporti di Roma – the company which manages Fiumicino and Ciampino airports – ENAV – the national company for managing and controlling air traffic, and Alitalia – the main Italian airline company.

The concept of A-CDM has become an integral part of the SESAR (Single European Sky ATM Research) project and will be adopted in Europe as the official working method in agreement with Eurocontrol standards.