Maastricht ADS-C and i4D

[maastricht]

Today Maastricht UAC became the first European centre to exchange 4D trajectories with an Airbus A320 using the new ATN ADS-C and CPDLC messages.
Flying from LFBO to EKCH MUAC uplinked route information and time constraints (RTAs). The Airbus flew to an accuracy of below 10 seconds.
A second leg returning from Copenhagen completed the flight trial with no issues.
Noracon (Thales) had trouble with legs in Scandinavia, mostly due to network coverage problems which meant they did similar operations over voice R/T.
Go Maastricht, number one yet again!!!

I-4D: Flying a new dimension | EUROCONTROL (http://www.eurocontrol.int/news/i-4d-flying-new-dimension)

[10W]

Be interesting to see what the proposals are for rolling out the application.

It's not actually the first demonstration of the concept though, so I'm afraid you are not quite number 1 by a long way :) It was done way back in the 1990's as part of the PHARE project which involved Eurocontrol HQ and several countries, including the UK, Belgium, France, Germany, and Holland.

Back then the test flights achieved the following.

''The concept of 4D navigation was demonstrated to be readily achievable: cross-track errors of less than 100 metres; height errors of less than 500 ft. in climb and descent; time errors less than 10 sec. in cruise and descent (and less than 5 sec. in TMA).''

So apart from an updated version of datalink (which was also used back then), have we come much further really ?

Be interesting to compare yesterdays flight with the PHARE ones to find out.

PHARE Final Report 1999 (http://www.ecacnav.com/downloads/99-70-09pharefinal10.pdf)

[garp]

First post after 10 years of lurking. :D