Stability Pact: SEE FABA - South East Europe Functional Airspace Block Approach

Go Back To SP Regional Infrastructure Portal

For a variety of economic and political reasons, it became very clear that an improvement of the civil aviation and the air traffic in SEE have to be put on a broad regional basis. From this perspective, the organization of regional cooperation between national service providers became a primary objective. First step was to promote the development of functional airspace blocks in the region in order to overcome the fragmentation in air traffic management - South East Europe Functional Airspace Block Approach (SEE FABA) was born. (LINK TO EC )

Already on 1^st of April 2005, the Directors of Civil Aviation Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro (at the time still joint country), the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and the UN Mission in Kosovo decide to examine opportunities with a view to implementing the Functional Airspace Block Approach in SEE (SEE FABA initiative) in consistency with the rest of European Air Traffic Management network. Point of origin has been the fact that the airspace users would require increased capacity, higher flexibility and improved cost efficiency which only could be achieved by a more integrated regional ATM system. The European Common Aviation Area (ECAA) agreement with the Single European Sky provisions appeared as the appropriate legal instrument to create a legal framework for enhanced and consolidated ATM cooperation in SEE. The main objectives of SEE FABA could be summarized as follows:

to prepare the Operational Concept Document,
to redefine the airspace design and the operationally driven FAB scenarios,
to define the legal requirements,
to analyse the economic implications and issues including the military requirements, to harmonize the ATC procedures,
to carry out an impact assessmen,t and

to analyse the safety case, while taking into consideration existing regional arrangements and considerations of ICAO, NATO, CANSO and the social partners /social issues).