>“ETFMS facilitates improvements in flight management from the pre-planning stage to the arrival of the flight. It maximises the updating of flight-related data and thus improves the real picture of a given flight, thereby contributing to the Gate-to-Gate Concept,” Eurocontrol explains on its website.
>The agency initially reported that contingency procedures were immediately put in place which reduced the capacity of the European network by around 10 per cent. http://www.airtrafficmanagement.net/2018/04/eurocontrol-give...
They don't seem to say what went wrong but do say
>In over 20 years of operation, the ETFMS has only had one other outage which occurred in 2001. The system currently manages up to 36,000 flights a day.
Tech details from wikipedia fr:
Written in ADA , and running on HP-UX , the system is based on an exchange of messages between the airlines (who will file / change / update flight plans), the air traffic control bodies and the CFMU , the messages are written in ADEXP format.
ETFMS uses at least 5 fundamental notions:
flight plan : describes the 4D trajectory of an airplane. regulation: aircraft rate applied to a "volume traffic". Example: 50 aircraft / hour "Traffic volume": association of a geographical reference (air sector, waypoint, airport, etc.) and a set of aircraft flows. list of takeoff slots or called slot . Example: if the rate of regulation is 30 planes / h, there will be a slot every 2 minutes: 10 hours, 10 h 2, etc. the delay: difference in time between the take-off time desired by the company and the schedule calculated by ETFMS.