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Newsletter archive      A journey through EATC’s operations manual – Part 1

A journey through EATC’s operations manual – Part 1

02.07.2018

The EATC Operations Manual (OM) is a feather in EATC’s cap. We are proud of it. The OM was one of our rst
challenges and, today, we offer our member nations a thorough basic document governing the ight
operations managed by EATC.

When EATC was inaugurated eight years ago, no overarching common military regulation existed. The EATC
nations produced documents to regulate the operation of their ying assets on their own. These national
regulations were translated at execution level for the use by the crews and mission support personnel.

With the establishment of EATC in 2010, one of the rst objectives was to have a common ight duty
regulation: the basis for ightplanning and control. The development of this common regulation took about
eight months and it was promulgated end of 2011.

Not without a number of obstacles to overcome…

 

One of the biggest hurdles was to start from common de nitions and ways to measure the limits – these were
not standardised among the four EATC founding nations. Moreover, two of the nations were using their
national language for their aviation documents.

To meet the challenge, the nations had not only to accept new de nitions and English as the governing
language but they also had to train their people accordingly.

Another target was to harmonise the way passenger and cargo was handled in the different nations and units. 

In fact, EATC has as an overall objective to optimise limited airlift assets, including the optimisation of loading
cargo and boarding passengers on the aircraft, without losing time.

This is why EATC published the EATC Ground Operations Manual or EGOM in 2013. The EGOM complements
the OM and is unique in the air business (not covered by traditional civilian regulations). It re ects what EATC
is doing really: ensuring that payload movement as requested by the nation is effectively moved from the
airport of departure to airport of arrival.

The OM is constantly developed, updated and enhanced….

A major factor that pushed the further development of the OM was the arrival of the A400M. For the rst time,
in many decades, a sizeable eet of common aircraft is operated by a single operator, the EATC. To maximize
this commonality, EATC aims to have, one day, quali ed crew members exchanged between nations, including
during on-going missions.

A prerequisite for this: the aircraft are to be operated in the same way and the crews are trained according to a
single standard procedure. This is why the four EATC nations using the A400M requested EATC to develop
common regulations on this prerequisite.
The arrival of the C-130J assets in France and in Germany, with a common unit, and the creation of the
Multinational MRTT Fleet (MMF) brings the number of common EATC eets to three. This with all seven EATC
nations being involved:

A 400M: Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, and Spain

C-130J: France, Germany and Italy

MMF: Belgium, Germany,  Luxembourg and the Netherlands (plus Norway)

 What is an operations manual?

Meet the challenge of the regulatory rules!
An overview into EATC’s OM

Interested to get to know the results and how EATC implemented these? Want some details on the different
subparts of the OM and read about the future? Just wait for the next EATC newsletter…

(/en) (https://www.mil.be/fr/composante-air)

(http://www.defense.gouv.fr/air) (http://www.luftwaffe.de)

(http://www.aeronautica.difesa.it) (http://www.armee.lu)

(https://www.defensie.nl/organisatie/luchtmacht)
(http://www.ejercitodelaire.mde.es/EA/ejercitodelaire/es/index.html)

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