Friday 20 June - Pascal Ballinger-  News & Press updates / EATC

The EATT, an EDA initiative with strong support from EATC, is currently the only European live flying training event exclusively dedicated to train the air- and ground crews of tactical transport aircrafts. 19 crews out of 10 nations have flown in from their homebases and today we have had the opportunity to follow the Czech crew during their first daily mission.

05.40Z: Briefing

Today’s mission consists of two paratrooper drops on static line. The first jump is foreseen at the so called AFRICA Drop zone (DZ) and the second at GOLD DZ.

Due to increased Ground-to-Air Threat; 5 to 10 SA-6 and SA-8 have disappeared from local warehouses; all the approaches have to be done in tactical low level flight.

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30 June – EATC -   News & Press updates

The Bulgarian Ministry of Defence film team followed the participants of EATT14 during their daily missions and interviewed the Commander of the Bulgarian Air Force, the Deputy Exercise Director and the Chief Maintenance.

Find the Bulgarian MOD EATT Clip.

A Distinguished Visitors (DV) Day is being held today as part of the European Air Transport Training (EATT14) in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. The two-week event, coordinated by the European Defence Agency (EDA) in close cooperation with hosts Bulgaria and the European Air Transport Command (EATC), aims to increase interoperability in the air transport area.

EATT14 takes place between 15 - 27 June and is the only European multinational air transport training of its kind. It brings together 460+ participants, 19 crews, and 10 transport aircraft from 10 different countries. 

EATT14: results so far

As of 24 June, more than 80 missions have taken place with over 130 flying hours. 100 paratroopers have been dropped alongside more the 32,000 KGs of cargo. The training objectives have been tailored to the needs of the different participating countries, with the missions developing on an increasing complexity basis.  Training objectives include airdrops, low level flying, and night operations – with around 10 hours of night flights having already taken place. The overall objective of the training is to achieve a far reaching level of interoperability between tactical airlift users in the area of operations and training.

Challenging Conditions

The first week of training was disrupted by severe weather conditions, which made flying conditions difficult and which caused serious and even fatal flooding in other areas of Bulgaria. Laurent Donnet, the Deputy Director of the Exercise, commented: "The flying conditions in the first week presented significant challenges for training, I would like to thank the Bulgarian authorities for the flexibility and support they have provided under these circumstances. However, in operations we need to be able to react to challenging conditions and we need to be able to do so together, that is why training events like this are so important. It allows us to pool resources and share knowledge, meaning ultimately that we can work more effecitvely and more efficiently together.”

Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Spain, and Norway have all sent transport aircraft, with Bulgaria and Greece supporting the event with fighters and a Greek AEW&C aircraft. As well as the participating countries, observers from Austria, Finland, Hungary, Portugal, Sweden, UK, USA, and the Heavy Airlift Wing based in Hungary also followed the training, with some of them indicating their intention of joining the exercise next year.

Background

The exercise takes places within the framework of the European Air Transport Fleet (EATF) partnership, which has been signed by 20 European countries in 2011. It aims to alleviate the existing airlift shortfall in the EU as well as to identify potential projects to optimise cooperation and coordination amongst air forces in the area of operations and training. EATT is just one event held within the EATF framework, it runs alongside an annual symposium - held in Athens this year - and the European Advanced Airlift Tactics Training Course (EAATTC), which will take place in Zaragoza for the first time in September 2014. 
 

More information

• Download high-resolution pictures in our Flickr Gallery 
• EATT14 Factsheet
• European Air Transport Command (EATC)
• European Air Transport Fleet (EATF)

Pictures: Pascal Ballinger, Martin Gesenhoff

21 June - Pascal Ballinger -  News & Press updates / EATC

In order to be able to make EATT14 run, the different responsibilities have been split into different cells or panels, every cell being responsible for a specific domain, a.e. exercise director, operations, training supervisor, flight safety, maintenance, intelligence, media & communication, computer and information system, ...

At the head of every panel a panel chief is responsible for the organization and the execution of the missions of his group of people.

Most of the panel chiefs come out of the EATC, what underlines the strong involvement of the EATC in EATT14 and what makes it easy to spread the EATC spirit and message amongst the participants of the exercise.

This is particularly visible in the Maintenance Cell where Maj Pierre Lambert puts a particular importance on Pooling and Sharing (P&S) and interoperability between nations. All these objectives are also in the scope of the EATC.

Maintenance Operation Center

The neuralgic spot of EATT’s maintenance is the so called MOC, the Maintenance Operation Center. Here, maintenance representatives out of all the participating nations and supplemental host nation representatives coordinate, under the lead of the experts from the EATC, all the maintenance activities, including cross-servicing, cross-maintenance, exchange of ground support equipment and spare parts.

Cross-servicing

Cross-servicing is the execution of services by the maintenance team of one nation on an aircraft of a second nation. The aim of cross-servicing is to improve multinational cooperation in order to increase interoperability and efficiency. During EATT14, this concept, based on STANAG 3430 (Responsibilities for Aircraft Cross Servicing) and STANAG 3812 (Responsiblities for Aircraft Cross Servicing Ground Crew Training), is trained by embedding one to two mechanics of a first nation into the maintenance organisation of the second nation. This trainee is, for the rest of the exercise, executing an “on the job training” (OJT) with his foreign colleagues. This OJT consists of marshalling the aircraft for arrival or departure, fitting or removing the safety pins, connecting the ground support equipment or even refuelling the aircraft.

After the successful completion of this training, a certificate of attendance is handed out to the trainee.

Exchange of GSE

Another initiative to improve multinational cooperation is the constitution of a common pool of ground support equipment (GSE).

As some of the nations use aircrafts of the same type (a.e. Italy, Norway, Belgium and France all use C-130), the constitution of a common pool of GSE permits to a nation not to ship all the necessary equipment to Plovdiv. So one nation brings the ladder, while another nation takes care of the ground power unit and the third nation is responsible for the maintenance kit or the tow bar.

This initiative also increases the interoperability between the nations and permits economies of scale because the logistics footprint of every participating nation is slightly reduced.

Exchange of spare parts

The exchange of spare parts is quite similar to the exchange of GSE.

What sounds simple in theory is in fact very complicated in practice.

Due to the actual airworthiness requirements, one nation is not necessarily allowed to use a spare part from another nation. This is due to the fact that every single spare part has to be certified as original by a qualified maintenance authority.

Amongst the EATC nations, Belgium, The Netherlands and Germany already exchange parts together with eight other nations through the Mutual Emergency Supply Support (MESS) procedure based on a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) initiated by the former NATO EUROLOG Air Sub Group and signed in 1984.

Together with the EDA, EATC identified possibilities to exchange spare parts of aircrafts and in order to develop an agreement based on MESS, EATC drafted a document for the new Mutual Logistic Support (MLS) project which will be discussed by the participating member states during the next months.

The possibility to exchange spare parts between EATC Partner Nations, but also with other countries will improve the availability of spare parts and reduce the risk for an aircraft being stuck on the ground because of parts availability issues.

This will also improve the availability of the EATC fleet and its operational readiness.

Cross-maintenance

Cross-maintenance is the execution of maintenance tasks by a technician from one nation on an aircraft of another nation.

During EATT14, under the supervision of a mechanics of the nation the aircraft belongs to, a mechanics from another nation can execute some basic maintenance tasks on that foreign plane. To stick to the actual Airworthiness rules, the supervisor of the nation the aircraft belongs to has still to certify the correct execution of that task.

Thanks to the promulgation of the A400M Common Ground Crew Training Concept that procedure shall change. The first version of the Ground Crew Training Concept will be the guideline to implement and fine-tune new training concepts which shall lead to a complete interchangeability of the mechanics between the EATC Participation Nations.

All these initiatives from the maintenance panel – be it cross-servicing or cross-maintenance, exchange of GSE or exchange of spare parts make that the European Air Transport Command can be seen as a very successful example of international cooperation.

Find more views about EATT at our EATT 2014 picture gallery.

24 June – Pictures: Pascal Ballinger, Martin Gesenhoff - EATC / News & Press updates

Find more views about EATT at our EATT 2014 picture gallery.

17 June  Pascal Ballinger - EATC

In Plovdiv (Bulgaria) for the moment military out of 20 nations are just staring to the sky with the same question in mind: when will the rain stop?
This morning, Tuesday June 17, 2014 the 3rd EATT started with some academicals for air crews. While inside the meeting room the crews have been briefed on air operations and have got an update on the threat situation in the vicinity of Plovdiv Airbase - while outside it was just raining “cats and dogs”.
EATT 14 brings together more than 450 participants, 19 crews and 10 transport aircraft of five different types having flown in from ten different countries.
The aircraft and crews come from Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, The Netherlands, Spain and Norway. Luxembourg, the smallest EATC Participation Nation joins with one single pilot embedded inside the Belgian crew.
Observers are coming from Austria, Finland, Hungary, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, UK, and USA.
Greece is supporting the exercise with F-16 aircraft and one EMB-145H AEW&C.

Find EATT 2014 picture gallery here.