The General Aviation community undertakes millions of flights on aircraft equipped with GNSS-enabled receivers. To support this community takes full advantage of this technology, it is a priority for the European GNSS Agency (GSA) and the EGNOS Service Provider (ESSP) to facilitate the publication of Instrument Flight Procedures based on EGNOS.
In this sense, the ESSP has supported GSA in the elaboration of a document containing safety promotion material on GNSS-based Instrument Flight Procedures implementation for General Aviation, Uncontrolled Aerodromes and Non-Instrument Runways, for EASA to publish it, in an effort to support a wider use of EGNOS in General Aviation.
The document draws together the current regulatory analysis supporting EGNOS-based operations, along with enablers and best practices to support implementation, open issues and, last but not least, use cases to encourage national authorities to approve these types of operations in their countries. These examples illustrate also how instrument flight procedures based on EGNOS can be implemented at locations where visual flight rules apply.
The material is aligned with the EASA Roadmap for General Aviation which identifies simpler and more proportional rules together with operations that are cost efficient, flexible enough and based on existing best practices. In fact, the document has been also published in the EASA website as Safety Promotion Material, in order to support and contribute to the continuous improvement of aviation safety in Europe and worldwide. The document highlights the importance of the EGNOS Service Provision in supporting the implementation of Instrument Flight Procedures for General Aviation.
The publication of this material is just the beginning. There are many on-going activities in which GSA and ESSP are collaborating to promote and illustrate the use of EGNOS in General Aviation, proving that GNSS/SBAS is ready to support EGNOS based operations for General Aviation.
This document is already published at EGNOS User Support, GSA and EASA websites.
*Picture credits: Grenchen aerodrome.