The state-owned company Naviair and Greenland Airports are looking forward to Thursday, May 14. According to the plan, the airport is to introduce a new initiative with great significance on Thursday. It concerns air traffic control.
– The opening of the TMA is now rapidly approaching, Naviair announced in its press release on Friday.
Last autumn, the airport was hit by restrictions from the Danish Transport Authority, which placed new limits on how quickly planes could land and take off.
Since then, work has begun on introducing air traffic control with the so-called TMA solution. It is expected that air traffic controllers will provide a significant improvement in capacity in Nuuk.
TMA stands for Terminal Maneuvering Area. It is an area in the lower airspace (up to about 6 kilometers in altitude) around Nuuk. Here, air traffic controllers will be directing the planes around during the airport's opening hours of 6:00-21:00.
Today, the area is uncontrolled airspace, where the pilots themselves are responsible for not flying into each other. But that is set to change on Thursday, writes Naviair:
– The unit itself will be named Nuuk Approach, which reflects that the air traffic control in the TMA is an approach and departure control service – that is, an air traffic control that controls the approach and departure to Nuuk Airport.
Both air traffic controllers and AFIS
There will still be AFIS operators in Nuuk who guide the planes to land at the airport.
– After the approach, the aircraft will be handed over to the AFIS service at Nuuk Airport, and departing aircraft will be handed over from Nuuk AFIS (Greenland Airports) to Nuuk Approach (Naviair) shortly after take-off.
The difference between AFIS and air traffic control (ATC) is that AFIS informs the aircraft, and air traffic controllers control them. In Nuuk, there is a somewhat unusual solution that combines the two. Something similar has been used in Norway.
The opening of the new solution requires that the Norwegian Transport Authority approves the new unit in the days leading up to the commissioning.
