1. Opening—President's Welcome
2. Acceptance of the Draft Minutes AGM 2015: There are no comments to the minutes, so they are accepted unanimously.

3. Reports:


a)    President's Message: Raf quickly explains his report.

b)    Executive Secretary: Michael reports what was talked about in the RRT meeting last week. Two interesting points that came up, but were not solved yet are the interpretation of the +/- 4 working days rule and the rule saying that ATCOs can be asked to stay up to 60min longer up to 12 times a year.

• We are currently trying to get support for starting to work on a bad WX procedure in MUAC. All centers around us seem to have something in place, so why not us?
• Finally a procedure for formation flights has been drafted and will be trained asap via CBT. As well it will be part of the military training coming up.
• EGATS has recognized a trend of more and more buffers being lost over the past years due to financial pressure, etc. This is causing problems sometimes and could become a greater risk in the future. Therefore it is necessary to steer against this development and keep/re-establish certain buffers as safety net. (see as well the Swiss Cheese Model below)
• We will ask for a review of certain decisions/changes made in the past. We will ask to get more involved regarding the professional aspects of the Lippe integration, now that it was decided.

The Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the Eurocontrol Guild of Air Traffic Services (EGATS), will be held on April 13th 2016, at 20.00h in D3.13/3.14 at MUAC.

For applications to join the Executive Board, the filled out “Nomination Form” has to be returned before April 3rd 2016 to the EGATS locker or directly to Michael Ott Team H4. You can ask any board-member to obtain a nomination form.

The entries and results of the 2015 EGATS Photo Competition are in. The theme for this edition was: 'Doors & Windows'. First place was for Wim Lentjes. Second prize went to Alexandru Ovidiu. Third prize was for Shirley Hicter. All the entries, including the winning ones can be seen in the online album here.

The following topics were discussed

• The board is still busy with some ongoing items, but we cannot present any results yet. The main ones are:
  • Bad WX procedure
  • Training of formation flights
• The board is concerned about how the planning of the x-training to the BSG is progressing. Several colleagues are ready for checkout since months, but no checkouts have been done by now. We will investigate with Luc Staudt.
• After the initiative of one of our colleagues we are working together with TUEM on a questionnaire about stress, fatigue, leave, traffic levels, etc.
• We discussed the OSDR and feel that it is outdated and urgently needs to be replaced by another more flexible system. We will talk to Nick Miller about that.
• NOTAMs and the status of NAV-aids are no longer published on E-brief, however mislaid headsets and validations of other sector groups are. We feel that some fine-tuning is required and will contact Nick Miller for that item.
• The AGM 2016 is planned for 13.04.16. Further updates are coming in the future.

For any questions and suggestions don’t hesitate to ask us or contact us via email.

Your EGATS EB

The following topics were discussed:

Bad WX procedures: The board has gathered some information from centres all around the world how they handle bad weather and strongly promotes to introduce a bad WX procedure in MUAC. In our eyes at the moment the decision is too much left to the DSUP and a firm procedure is needed.

Brussels Sectors: We are very critical about the Brussels sector group leave plan for next year and already voiced our concerns via the appropriate channels. The Planning office is currently working on freeing up extra leave slots for staff.

 Update: The draft minutes of the 2015 EGATS AGM can be found here.

The EGATS Annual General Meeting (AGM) will be held on March 2nd 2015, starting at 20:00lcl at the Maastricht UAC Centre.

The preliminary agenda is as follows:

1. Opening—President’s Welcome
2. Acceptance of the Draft Minutes AGM 2014
3. Reports:
   1. President’s Message
   2. Executive Secretary
   3. Professional Committee and Technical Committee

The latest issue of OUPUT, the magazine for EGATS members is now available here. Members will find a host of articles in this issues, including subjects such as Just Culture, IFATCA ERM 2014 Zadar, EGATS Photo Competition 2014, The international day of the controller and much much more.

• Our AGM is planned for 02.03.15 at 20:00 in D3.13/D3.14 The lottery for the lucky winner to travel to the IFATCA ERM will be done at the AGM, this time.

• The stop of the automatic incasso is our biggest worry at the moment. So far many members didn’t fill out the form to deduct the membership fee from their salary and didn’t pay it via bank transfer either, even after all the reminders send out. If the current situation doesn’t change EGATS would lose about 25% of our membership.  We cannot tighten the budget anymore by saving on one end or the other without having to stop some of the work we do. And even more important we would represent a smaller number of OPS staff, which means our voice will not be as strong as it used to be with a powerful and strong membership backing us up. We know that a major factor for losing members is the lack of interesting flight deals, but unfortunately there is nothing we can do about it, no matter how hard we try to get deals. However you shouldn’t forget that our work goes far beyond the flight department. E.g. the new building would not be there without EGATS pushing for it for years in the past. This is just one example for our work and you can follow us  the easiest under EGATS.ORG.

• EGATS is invited to start the work on the Lippe integration project and we are very keen to do so.

As you all know, the world of Air Traffic Control is an ever changing and challenging one.  So it is with the banking world currently, and EGATS does not remain unaffected.  First there was the forced change of banking institutions for our accounts, where we moved from Deutsche Bank back to our former partner ABN AMRO, unfortunately with a resulting change of account numbers.  Then came the full implementation of IBAN and BIC banking, bringing with it a new set of rules and formats for the Automatic Incasso contracts we had with a majority of our members.  This was the direct debit system that was implemented by my predecessor just about a decade ago, whereby most of you had authorized EGATS to withdraw the money directly from your accounts, thereby saving you the trouble of remembering to do it yourself and us of having to remind you.  However, due to massive changes in the European banking system, this procedure has now to be abandoned.  The legal and technical requirements, not to mention the cost to EGATS, of using the new SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) Incasso agreements is just too burdensome. 

What do we propose instead?  Well, we have managed to agree with Eurocontrol that the annual membership fees, currently still 55 €, for those who wish, can be deducted directly from your monthly salary, and transferred to us.  This would normally be done together with the January salary (i.e. end of December).  For the year 2015, however, because of the timing of the change, this will most likely only be achieved with the March salary (so, end of February).