Air Defender 23 means a big impact on flight ops this week

What’s happening?

Air Defender 23 is a major military event which is taking place from Monday 12th – Thursday 22nd June.

It overlaps with a whole bunch of other big military events like KRYPTON 23 (great name) and BALTOPS 23 (slightly weird name) and other big NATO things.

What’s it mean for ops?

Probably a whole load of delays and re-routes and disruption. In fact, they say “100 regulations and around 30 000′ delays link to this event”.

You want specifics? Fine, Eurocontrol are expecting some 800 flights to be re-routed daily, and about 300 of them can expect to have at least 60nm extra added to their routings.

The average delay will be around 2-3 minutes per flight, but with the opening of additional sectors and transit routes, they aren’t expecting any strategic cancellations to be needed.

These are the sectors impacted by it:

EDWW – BREMEN ACC (ACC), EDYY – MAASTRICHT UAC (ACC), EPWW – WARSZAWA ACC (ACC), LKAA – PRAGUE ACC (ACC), EDUU – KARLSRUHE UAC (ACC), EDGG – LANGEN ACC (ACC), EDMM – MUNCHEN ACC (ACC)

Give me more info.

The best spot for info is the Eurocontrol NOP, but here are some links to various useful bits:

• AIP SUP 07/23 (Germany)
• AIP SUP 2/23 (Czech)
• A presentation on it