Investigation of Alternative Airspace Charging

The Client

Major European ANSP’s Alliance

The Challenge

Our client – the ANSP’s Alliance – is constantly striving for further increase in its performance for the benefit of its customers. With the European Commission considering potential changes to the common charging scheme Regulation, together with changes to the performance scheme Regulation as part of preparations for the third reference period (RP3) of the performance scheme, our client wished to get a better, independent, understanding of different approaches to airspace charging.

In particular our client wished to use an independent expert report to provide them with clear and concise advice and intelligence on the position that they, as an Alliance, should take.

Our Approach

Think produced a Discussion Paper on behalf of our client.  As with many such papers, our aim was to deliver it in relatively quick timescales at a relatively low cost.  At the same time, the concise and readable report had to be underpinned by expert knowledge and a solid body of evidence. 

Our initial analysis focused on the impacts of the alternative charging schemes for the ANSP’s within the Alliance, identifying pros and cons of each option.  That analysis was used in workshops with Alliance members in order to generate more in depth discussion on they key aspects of the alternatives.  It was of critical importance that the position taken in the paper was one which the Alliance felt truly represented their views and therefore it was important to get buy in and agreement from all stakeholders. 

Following the workshops we provided a series of final reports and presentations outlining the alternative charging schemes and issues associated with their implementation for the Alliance and presented a proposed way forward to the Alliance board. 

The Outcome

A Discussion Paper which explored the options and allowed conclusions to be drawn on the Alliances views on the proposals was delivered to our client who in turn used it as the basis for their own discussions with the European Commission.