Air Traffic Flow Management - ATFM is a service established for the purpose of contributing to a safe, orderly and expeditious flow of air traffic, ensuring that air traffic control capacity is optimally utilized and that traffic volume is compatible with declared capacity. Its objective is to ensure an efficient flow of air traffic when demand is expected to exceed the available capacity of the air traffic control system, i.e. when there is an imbalance between demand and capacity.
Air traffic control capacity reflects the ability of the system to provide service and is expressed in numbers of aircraft entering a specified portion of airspace in a given period of time.
ATFM supports air traffic control to provide the most efficient use of airspace and airport capacity.
Measures to control air traffic flow must be taken in certain cases to ensure a reasonable balance between traffic demand and the capacity to accommodate that demand. These measures are restrictive in nature and, therefore, should be kept to a minimum and applied selectively, to affect only that portion of the traffic causing the imbalance.
ATFM delivery is composed of three phases: strategic, pretactical and tactical. These phases should not be considered as specific elements, but as a continuous cycle of planning, action and review fully integrated into the ATM planning and post-operational assessment processes.
The ICAO South American Region Air Navigation Implementation Group, SAMIG, is supported by the RLA 06 901 project. This group has study and planning bodies that promote the development of ATFM in the region, based on practical initiatives and activities, among others, the execution of the OPSAM Operations Plan that contains the distribution of the ATFM Daily Plan (ADP) describing the necessary capacity resources and, if necessary, the measures to manage traffic, and on the other hand, the sessions for the evaluation of pre-tactical data, once a week, and strategic data, once a month.
OPSAM also provides the management of an ATFM demand analysis dashboard, where state services collaboratively present their strategic and post-operations information, generating basic performance indicators.
SAMIG, through its 11 member states, approved the guide for implementation of the atfm service in the SAM region 2021 - 2025, which orients the progressive implementation of ATFM, starting with basic activities that include the measurement of runway and air traffic control sector capacity, in anticipation of the appearance of future demand-capacity imbalances, evolving towards an A T F M service. interregional crossborderThe aim is to provide an integrated and interconnected supply that facilitates pre-tactical and tactical operational information management in South America, as well as with the adjacent Caribbean region.
The ATFM crossborder will enable the ATFM measures issued, if necessary to manage imbalances, to be more efficient and have less impact on air operations, as they will be formulated in a collaborative process between the originating unit and the adjacent units that will be involved in the management of these flights.
For more details on the ATFM in our region, we invite you to visit the following website www.navisam.aero
Thank you and see you soon.
