FRACS: A Talent Incubator for ENAC Students
PHOTO: Left: noise contours (Lden indicator) generated with IMPACT for 60 short-haul aircraft departures over a single day at Toulouse-Blagnac Airport. Right: snapshot of a simulation of departure and approach traffic at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport.
FRACS and interns in the company’s strategy
The interns recruited are dedicated to specific projects linked to the projects and products developed by FRACS. For example, a trainee previously contributed to the development of METEOR, while a student worked on her final year project to collect socio-economic data to be correlated with the traffic data managed by ATD, in order to facilitate the development of air traffic forecasts. Finally, as part of a study related to the mapping of Walloon aerodromes, a trainee took part in data collection and analysis.
On 24 March, Noé Fillon, a student on a Specialized Master’s in Airport Management at ENAC, a former ENTPE [1] engineering graduate and future STAC recruit, joined FRACS for a four-month internship.
This internship is helping to improve DIADEME, an online platform for modelling airspace management, which FRACS has been developing since 2022. DIADEME is indeed advantageous because of its accessibility and its collaborative features, giving the different players in a project the opportunity to generate and edit traffic scenarios.
It is then necessary to assessed, which in some cases may involve third-party platforms or models. In order to broaden the range of uses for DIADEME, enhancing the platform’s compatibility with other models is therefore an important lever.
In the case of studies on the environmental impact of air traffic (noise perceived on the ground, emissions of CO2 and atmospheric pollutants), Eurocontrol’s IMPACT platform is a reliable model. It is compliant with Doc 29 of the European Civil Aviation Conference (ECAC) regarding noise impact calculation, and approved by ICAO’s Committee on Aviation Environmental Protection (CAEP) concerning emissions of atmospheric pollutants and noise impact. It is therefore interesting to develop links between DIADEME and IMPACT.
While IMPACT’s assessment of scenarios from DIADEME currently involves lengthy manipulations in addition to significant approximations, Noé Fillon’s aim is to enable data exports from DIADEME to be directly compatible with IMPACT, with minimal user action. This will open up the possibility of easily and effectively comparing different airspace management scenarios from an environmental point of view.
The example of the Noé mission illustrates the collaboration between FRACS and future young professionals. The result is positive for both parties: the trainees acquire new skills, and FRACS benefits by improving its product offering.
[1] «École Nationale des Travaux Publics de l’État» (National School of State Public Works), an engineering school located in Vaulx-en-Velin, Rhône, France, training students in the field of territorial planning (mobility and transportation, city and environment, civil engineering and building)
