On 14 January 2016, EUROCONTROL hosted a major meeting to move forward with the implementation of NewPENS. NewPENS, which will build on the success of the current Pan-European Network Services (PENS) infrastructure, aims to become the means of ground-to-ground communication for all connections between all ATM stakeholders across Europe. Following the decision of the 41 EUROCONTROL Member States to entrust EUROCONTROL with a Common Procurement Agreement (CPA), 34 organisations, both civil and military, have signed the Agreement and are now part of the NewPENS project.

“NewPENS enables System Wide Information Management (SWIM) data exchange across the whole of Europe as ATM will become much more data-driven in future,” said Frank Brenner, Director General of EUROCONTROL, in his welcome address. “NewPENS will carry data from the Network Manager, the EUROCONTROL Centralised Services and from the air navigation service providers.”

The meeting, made up of 36 representatives from 23 organisations, kick-started the governance arrangements between EUROCONTROL and the ANSPs for the NewPENS project. During the meeting, Mr Daniel Weder, CEO of SKYGUIDE, was elected as Chairman of the Top Management Body (TMB).

Mr Egon Koopmann, Director Systems and Infrastructure Services of DFS, was elected as Chairman of the NewPENS Executive Board (PEB), and Mr Maksim Ethermaj, Director of the Technical Division of ALBCONTROL as Vice-Chair.

The current PENS contract will come to an end during 2018. The new governance structure will therefore be focusing on ensuring that the timeline for having a new contract in place can be followed. The Call for Tenders will be published in the first semester of 2016, with offers expected in December 2016. The aim is to have the contract in place by the end of 2017 so the migration to the new provider can start by the middle of 2018.