The “Airports of the Grand-Ouest” (VINCI AIRPORTS group) entrusted to COHOR,Airport Slot Coordination France, the collection of flight schedules data for Nantes-Atlantique airport (NTE) in France since the start of the Summer scheduling season 2017. COHOR has also been collecting the flight intentions of aircraft operators for Saint-Nazaire Montoir airport.
This process implemented for the first time for a French airport consists of air carriers sending to COHOR, coordinators of the French most congested airports, standard messages (SCRs) usually used for airport slot applications at coordinated airports in order to file their flight schedule and keep it up to date. A large number of carriers have indeed the ability to automatically send flight schedules request updates to any airport coordinator across the world when they modify their flight schedules and COHOR system is able to automatically process and reply to such requests. This process made it also possible for the airport team to have very early access to all planned schedules from carriers in a single format transmitted automatically by COHOR.
In addition, COHOR integrated capacity data related to Nantes various airport resources into its computerized coordination software, SLOTIX, and has been able to periodically provide the airport managing body with a congestion status of its critical resources on the basis of reliable, consistent and homogeneous data enabling it to anticipate possible congestion and the actions to be implemented.
The tools provided by COHOR, (SLOTIX and the online coordination portal e-Airportslots.aero) together with the collaboration of Nantes airport handling agents, also enabled the airport to better manage the general and business aviation traffic, particularly near the peaks of commercial traffic of the airport.
On the basis of the encouraging results of this scheme during the present Summer 2017 season, Nantes-Atlantique airport informed COHOR that it does not plan to request facilitation or coordination of the airport but rather decided to renew this fruitful cooperation with COHOR for the collection of schedules data for the summer 2018 and winter 2018-2019 periods.
Nantes-Atlantique airport and COHOR are therefore grateful to all concerned air carriers and airport handling agents for their valuable collaboration to this operation, which demonstrates the operational efficiency of information sharing using an existing international process known of all the players and already used by all the carriers which operate flights to coordinated airports or to schedule facilitated airports around the world.
