Blog: what’s ahead for ACOG in 2024

Published on: in the Airspace Modernisation, Masterplan category

2024 is shaping up to be a big year for ACOG!

We started with the commencement of an important milestone in the delivery of the Airspace Change Masterplan – our first public engagement exercise. Launching on 29 January and running until 10 March, this concentrates on the Scottish cluster of airports.

Edinburgh Airport, Glasgow Airport, and NATS are the sponsors for the changes required in Scotland and over the past 12 months, ACOG has been supporting them, to progress their proposals as part of the next stage of the airspace change process.

This meant that we were in a position to kick off a period of public engagement, ahead of submitting the Masterplan for Scotland, planned for Q2 this year. The engagement exercise seeks feedback on, amongst other things, how specific design trade-offs may be presented by the sponsors, how information on the cumulative impacts of different design choices have been calculated, and any potential gaps in, or improvements to, the Masterplan.

Later in the process, the sponsors of the changes will be running their own public consultations, setting out any proposed changes to flight paths. Stakeholders will have an opportunity to offer feedback on the detailed proposals at this stage.

Scotland is one of four clusters of airports that make up the Masterplan. The others are:

  • the west of the UK, known as the West Terminal Airspace;
  • the north of England, known as the Manchester Terminal Control Area (MTMA) and;
  • the southeast of England, known as the London Terminal Control Area (LTMA).

Maintaining this momentum, we’ve just opened the second engagement exercise which focuses on an area of airspace south of Gatwick, extending beyond the south coast to the boundary with French airspace. Two airspace change proposals  – known collectively as London Airspace South (LAS) – are being sponsored by London Gatwick and NATS. LAS is part of the wider London and South East cluster and is the first phase of airspace modernisation proposed in the South East of England. The proposed LAS deployment is a relatively simple airspace change that can be deployed sooner than the rest of the South East cluster, realising benefits earlier. Future phases of deployment, which include proposals to modernise the airspace serving the other South East airports, are under development.

The learnings from these two exercises will be taken into the next public engagements. We’ll be looking to the north of England cluster next, which includes East Midlands, Leeds/ Bradford, Liverpool and Manchester Airports.

It’s been an exciting start to the year with momentum now firmly behind the programme. I look forward to continuing to help deliver this critical national infrastructure project for the UK and working alongside our stakeholders to do so.