The recent airspace kafuffle in Ireland was sparked by the authority seeking to comply with their obligations with Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2018/1048.
As a VFR pilot much of it goes over my head, but the essence is that every airport with an IFR approach to a runway, will have to have a PBN (which I understand to be GPS based?) approach to at least one runway by 25 Jan 2024, and all runways by 6 June 2030, and by 6 June 2030 conventional approach aids are to be withdrawn (Article 5 Exclusive Use of PBN).
As I understand it, a single conventional aid is allowed to be retained as a backup.
Is this on the radar in other EASA countries? Are any moves being made to implement it? As I read the regulation, plans for implementation should have been in place since last December. And it’s a lot of GPS approaches to be implemented in less than 2 years.
AFAIK, it’s “on-track” the case for France & Netherlands, actually, removing ILS Cat1 and every VOR/NDB out there, ILS Cat2&3 will be maintained and DME will be retained
In NL most of the conventional navaids were removed last summer, but ILS and DME remained, as did on-field VORs used for approaches.
dublinpilot wrote:
And it’s a lot of GPS approaches to be implemented in less than 2 years.
If there is already a ground radio based approach (e.g. ILS) established at that runway, the effort of adding a GPS-approch is very limited.
The “funny” thing is when a radio navaid (let’s say an NDB) is removed, and with it the corresponding hold, but ATC still sends you to that hold, mere seconds before reaching the point.
What could possibly go wrong:
“Finnish govt agency warns of unusual aircraft GPS interference”
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/technology/finnish-govt-agency-warns-of-unusual-aircraft-gps-interference/
There has to be something else behind this. Is the EU funding the development of GPS approaches? If paid for, they work out at best part of €30k per runway end, although AIUI it depends on how much surveying has already been done. Some pointers here. Airports which currently don’t have GPS approaches don’t have them because something is preventing them e.g.
You can’t just “mandate” something unless it is actually possible to do it 
I don’t see how the EU will overcome point 1 above, given that it is a national regulation.
And forcing the removal of navaids even if the airport wants to keep them makes no sense at all. I can see that many/most are quite pointless (e.g. VORs and NDBs unless you want a GPS backup) but that’s not the same thing.
And then you get stuff like this
especially at the present time (the war in Ukraine).
It’d be easy to jam ILS too though (and all the other radio beacons)? Having a secondary system would be good of course, but another transmission-mode on another frequency seems like a poor backup system if you’re worried about jamming.
I’m not a HAM, so maybe it’s more complicated than I think?
Michael_J wrote:
“Finnish govt agency warns of unusual aircraft GPS interference”
I’d argue that ground based radio naiads are even easier to spoof.Peter wrote:
You can’t just “mandate” something unless it is actually possible to do it I don’t see how the EU will overcome point 1 above, given that it is a national regulation.
As far as I understand it, the regulation only affects airports/runways that already have some kind of instrument approach – I don’t see how your points affect these runways as the two requirements are equally applying to traditional (ground based) instrument approaches – don’t they?
