A successful EATC air transport mission needs to meet a large number of requirements. One of them is a thorough and expert planning of the mission. But do you know that planning may already start 12 to 18 months before a mission is actually executed?
This is what we call the long term planning! It starts well ahead of time, when the “National Movement Transport Coordination Centers” identify large troop and cargo movements or exercises for the next 1,5 year. These so-called “air transport intentions” are shared via EATC’s air transport software MEAT*. They are not necessarily detailed information and, in due time, they need to be transformed into an in-depth “air transport request”, but they allow EATC to develop, early enough, a multinational overview of needs, identify activities peaks and if needed look out for solutions.
As a matter of fact, EATC controls a large number of aircraft. However, the demands for air mobility are, and have always been, bigger than the number of available and suitable assets to fly the member nations’ requests. Thus, it is absolutely necessary to have an overview to be able to predict possible conflicts in periods when not enough aircraft are available and to find possible synergies to combine demands. Long term planning is therefore essential.
The long term planning is a continuous process that never stops. The national experts from the national movement centers introduce, via MEAT, their intentions, and ultimately requests for air transport. Moreover, twice a year, EATC organises a long term planning conference, gathering experts from the seven member nations, to exchange medium and long term operational or training plans, to discuss lessons learned from previous operations and to review how to improve the operational process.
On 10 and 11 April 2024, EATC held the first long term planning conference edition of 2024. On the agenda, among others, the needs for the large Indo-Pacific activities that will take place this summer. This is a perfect example of long term planning. The national experts introduced their intentions already in 2023 so that EATC could plan ahead, identify where support from non-participating nations is needed and meet in a best possible way the requests for air-to-air refuelling and logistic flights.
For your information: during the Indo-Pacific activities starting mid-June until mid-August 2024, Germany, France, Spain and Italy will deploy forces from Europe to the Indo-Pacific region and conduct different exercises. EATC supports the nations planning, among others the air-to-air refuelling for about 40 fighters and the accompanying logistic flights.
* “Management of European Air Transport”, an EATC “in house” designed software to support the processes of military air mobility activities and monitoring the mission status in real time.