The implementation date for the UK Civil Aviation Authority’s (CAA) new decision-making process for Planned Permanent Redistribution (PPR) proposals has been postponed from 1 November 2019 until 1 February 2020
Last October, the Government gave the CAA, as airspace regulator, a decision-making role for a wholly new category of airspace change.
This category is known as a planned and permanent redistribution of air traffic through changes in air traffic control operational procedure, or PPR for short.
The Government had identified that while changes to airspace design are subject to the CAA’s airspace change process, and need to be consulted on, air traffic control procedural changes can be implemented without consultation, even where the noise impacts from the resulting shift in the distribution of aircraft are similar.
As a result, the CAA is in the process of designing a new process for making these decisions, which was due to be implemented on 1 November.
However, due to the liquidation of Thomas Cook, and the unprecedented scale of the repatriation programme to return its passengers to the UK, the CAA agreed with the Government to postpone this by three months, until 1 February 2020.
This decision was made to allow the CAA to redeploy staff across the organisation so that they could undertake the repatriation programme.
For more information please contact airspace.policy@caa.co.uk
