Rabat – Under the agreement signed between the Arab Civil Aviation Organization and the Office National des Aéroports of the Kingdom of Morocco, and in an effort on the organization’s side to upgrade the civil aviation sector staff in light of the emerging Corona crisis (COVID-19) and thus raise the level of safety, the Arab Civil Aviation Organization organized a distance training course on "performance-based navigation". 31 participants from the Office National des Aéroports, air traffic controllers, air navigation equipment technicians and air navigation procedure designers took part in this course from 16 to 20 November 2020 between 0800-1200 GMT (0800-1200 UTC) on a daily basis.
His Excellency Eng. Abdenbi Manar, Director General of the Arab Civil Aviation Organization, opened the session, and welcomed the participants while emphasizing the objectives of the course, which are mainly to provide an overview of the concept and principles of performance-based navigation (PBN) with a detailed explanation of the components of performance-based navigation and the related method of implementation.
The concept of performance-based navigation represents a shift from relying on sensors to using performance-based navigation, by defining the performance conditions in the navigational specifications, which in turn determine how to choose the sensors and navigation equipment that meets the performance requirements.
Under performance-based navigation, general navigation conditions are defined in terms of operational conditions. The air operators then evaluate their choice of navigation technologies and services that meet these requirements. Thus, each operator has the opportunity to choose the best options to meet the established operational conditions in terms of cost-effectiveness without imposing any specific solution on him.
Performance-based navigation pathways and procedures are designed on the specific navigation specifications in terms of accuracy, safety, availability, continuity and functionality of the proposed operations in a particular airspace context because PBN implementation affects all areas including aircraft operations, clearances, regulatory licenses, training, flight procedure design, airspace design and aircraft separation .