ED-133A "Flight Object Interoperability" in Second Open Consultation

EUROCAE is proud to announce that ED-133A (Flight Object Interoperability) has been subjected to the second Open Consultation (OC). This second OC is required because of the significant changes that needed to be made to the original version of the document in order to resolve the comments – in particular the Non-Concur comments – received during the first OC. We thank all contributors who made this achievement possible.

This second Open Consultation is available here until 20 February.

Open Consultation Results and Dissenting Opinion Procedure

During the first OC a total of 96 comments were received, 28 of which were
Non-Concur comments.

During the Comment Resolution Meetings on 24/25 January 2023 and 16 March 2023 these Non-Concur Comments could not be resolved and it was agreed to invoke the Dissenting Opinion Procedure. As well the Non-Concur Commenters as also the Working Group members summarised their position and submitted them – together with some supporting statements – to the Council accompanied by the draft ED-133A and the Comment Resolution Sheet from the first OC.

Council Task Force

The Council considered the non-concur comments received as well as the WG position and decided to set up a Task Force to support the resolution of the comments. The TF, consisting of several Council members, the WG-59 leadership, the dissenting organisations, and the EUROCAE Secretariat, met on a monthly basis. During the discussions it was possible to achieve further understanding of the issues at stake. Numerous discussions took place between the Dissenters and the Working Group Leadership to try to overcome the differences and find a way forward that would result in a publication of the document as a Standard.

Based on the proposals, a work programme was agreed for WG-59 with the aim to develop a roadmap to the publication of ED-133A.

Along this roadmap, the activities as described in the following table were successfully executed by WG-59:

Activity 1 Alignment with NM 4DT CONOPS and ATC-ATC-IOP

Activity 2 Alignment with ED-254

Activity 3 Align common elements with other operational concepts

Activity 4 ED-133A technology agnostic

Activity 5 AIS/MET Data inclusion

Dissenting Opinion Outcome

Following the successful completion of these activities, the Non-Concur commenters agreed that their concerns were processed with a satisfactory result. Due to the scope of changes applied during Comment Resolution a second OC is required by the EUROCAE processes. This second OC was launched on 06 January 2025 and will close on 20 February 2025. In line with the EUROCAE processes, the comments received during this second OC will be discussed and resolved by WG-59. Once this will be completed successfully, ED-133A can be published.

Next steps

It should be noted that the Foreword and Section 1.3 of the draft ED-133A already contain some information about future activities required to further develop ED-133 in the future.

Following a successful second Open Consultation and publication of ED-133A, further steps required to achieve this goal will be reviewed by the Council and TAC in cooperation with WG-59, in line with the usual EUROCAE procedures.