International Civil Aviation Organization [EN]

The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), pronounced /aɪˈkeɪoʊ/, (in French: Organisation de l'aviation civile internationale, OACI ), is a specialized agency of the United Nations. It codifies the principles and techniques of international air navigation and fosters the planning and development of international air transport to ensure safe and orderly growth. Its headquarters are located in the Quartier International of Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
The ICAO Council adopts standards and recommended practices concerning air navigation, its infrastructure, flight inspection, prevention of unlawful interference, and facilitation of border-crossing procedures for international civil aviation. In addition, the ICAO defines the protocols for air accident investigation followed by transport safety authorities in countries signatory to the Convention on International Civil Aviation, commonly known as the Chicago Convention.
The ICAO should not be confused with the International Air Transport Association (IATA), a trade organization for airlines also headquartered in Montreal, or with the Civil Air Navigation Services Organisation (CANSO), an organization for Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSP's) with its headquarters at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol in the Netherlands.

History

The forerunner to the ICAO was the International Commission for Air Navigation (ICAN). It held its first convention in 1903 in Berlin, Germany but no agreements were reached amongst the eight countries that attended. At the second convention in 1906, also held in Berlin, 27 countries attended. The third convention, held in London, United Kingdom in 1912 allocated the first radio callsigns for use by aircraft. The ICAN existed until 1945, when the Provisional International Civil Aviation Organization (PICAO) was established. The PICAO became the ICAO in 1947.

Statute

The 9th edition of the Convention on International Civil Aviation includes modifications from 1948 up to year 2006. The ICAO refers to its current edition of the Convention as the statute, and designates it as ICAO Doc 7300/9. The Convention has 18 Annexes. These Annexes are listed by title in the article Convention on International Civil Aviation.

Membership

International Civil Aviation Organization member states

 

ICAO members are 190 of the United Nations members and the Cook Islands.
The non-member states are Dominica, Liechtenstein, Niue, Tuvalu, Vatican City and the states with limited recognition.

Standards

ICAO logo.

Top: ICAO acronym in English, French/Spanish and Russian.

Bottom: ICAO acronym in Chinese and Arabic

 

The ICAO also standardizes certain functions for use in the airline industry, such as the Aeronautical Message Handling System AMHS; this probably makes it a standards organization.
The ICAO defines an International Standard Atmosphere (also known as ICAO Standard Atmosphere), a model of the standard variation of pressure, temperature, density, and viscosity with altitude in the Earth's atmosphere. This is useful in calibrating instruments and designing aircraft.
The ICAO standardizes machine-readable passports worldwide. Such passports have an area where some of the information otherwise written in textual form is written as strings of alphanumeric characters, printed in a manner suitable for optical character recognition. This enables border controllers and other law enforcement agents to process such passports quickly, without having to input the information manually into a computer. ICAO publishes Doc 9303, Machine Readable Travel Documents, the technical standard for machine-readable passports. A more recent standard is for biometric passports. These contain biometrics to authenticate the identity of travellers. The passport's critical information is stored on a tiny RFID computer chip, much like information stored on smartcards. Like some smartcards, the passport book design calls for an embedded contactless chip that is able to hold digital signature data to ensure the integrity of the passport and the biometric data.
Communication, Navigation, Surveillance / Air Traffic Management (CNS/ATM) systems are communications, navigation, and surveillance systems, employing digital technologies, including satellite systems together with various levels of automation, applied in support of a seamless global air traffic management system.

Registered codes

Both ICAO and IATA have their own airport and airline code systems. ICAO uses 4-letter airport codes (vs. IATA's 3-letter codes). The ICAO code is based on the region and country of the airport—for example, Charles de Gaulle Airport has an ICAO code of LFPG, where L indicates Southern Europe, F, France, PG, Paris de Gaulle, while Orly Airport has the code LFPO (the 3rd letter sometimes refers to the particular flight information region (FIR) or the last two may be arbitrary). In the most of the world, the ICAO and IATA codes are unrelated—for example, Charles de Gaulle Airport has an IATA code of CDG and Orly, ORY. However, the location prefix for continental United States is K and the ICAO codes are usually the IATA code with this prefix—for example, the ICAO code for LAX is KLAX. Canada follows a similar pattern, where a prefix of C is usually added to an IATA code to create the ICAO code—for example, Edmonton is YEG or CYEG. (In contrast, airports in Hawai'i are in the Pacific region and so have ICAO codes that start with PH—for example, PHKO for Kona.) Note that not all airports are assigned codes in both systems—for example, airports that do not have airline service may not need an IATA code.
ICAO also assigns 3-letter airline codes (vs. the more-familiar 2-letter IATA codes)—for example, UAL vs. UA for United Airlines). ICAO also provides telephony designators to aircraft operators worldwide, a one- or two-word designator used on the radio, usually, but not always, similar to the aircraft operator name. For example, the identifier for Japan Airlines International is JAL and the designator is Japan Air, but Aer Lingus is EIN and Shamrock . Thus, a Japan Airlines flight numbered 111 would be written as "JAL111" and pronounced "Japan Air One Eleven" on the radio, while a similarly numbered Aer Lingus would be written as "EIN111" and pronounced "Shamrock One Eleven".
ICAO maintains the standards for aircraft registration ("tail numbers"), including the alphanumeric codes that identify the country of registration. For example, airplanes registered in the United States have tail numbers starting with N.
ICAO is also responsible for issuing alphanumeric aircraft type codes that contain 2–4 characters. These codes provide the identification that is typically used in flight plans. An example of this is the Boeing 747 that would use (depending on the variant) B741, B742, B743, etc.

Regions and regional offices

ICAO World Headquarters, Montreal, Canada

 

The ICAO has seven regional offices serving nine regions:

1. Asia and Pacific, Bangkok, Thailand

2. Middle East, Cairo, Egypt

3. Western and Central Africa, Dakar, Senegal

4. South America, Lima, Peru

5. North America, Central America and Caribbean, Mexico City, Mexico

6. Eastern and Southern Africa, Nairobi, Kenya

7. Europe and North Atlantic, Paris, France

 

Leadership

 

List of Secretaries General

• Albert Roper (France) (1944–1951)
• Carl Ljungberg (Sweden) (1952–1959)
• Ronald MacAllister Macdonnell (Canada) (1959–1964)
• Bernardus Tielman Twigt (Netherlands) (1964–1970)
• Assad Kotaite (Lebanon) (1970–1976)
• Yves Lambert (France) (1976–1988)
• Shivinder Singh Sidhu (India) (1988–1991)
• Philippe Rochat (Switzerland) (1991–1997)
• Renato Claudio Costa Pereira (Brazil) (1997–2003)
• Taïeb Chérif (Algeria) (2003–2009)
• Raymond Benjamin (France) (2009–present)

List of Council Presidents

• Edward Pearson Warner (United States) (1947–1957)
• Walter Binaghi (Argentina) (1957–1976)
• Assad Kotaite (Lebanon) (1976–2006)
• Roberto Kobeh Gonzalez (Mexico) (2006–present)

 ICAO and climate change

Emissions from international aviation are specifically excluded from the targets agreed under the Kyoto Protocol. Instead, the Protocol invites developed countries to pursue the limitation or reduction of emissions through the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). ICAO’s environmental committee continues to consider the potential for using market-based measures such as trading and charging, but this work is unlikely to lead to global action. It is currently developing guidance for states who wish to include aviation in an emissions trading scheme (ETS) to meet their Kyoto commitments, and for airlines who wish to participate voluntarily in a trading scheme.
Emissions from domestic aviation are included within the Kyoto targets agreed by countries. This has led to some national policies such as fuel and emission taxes for domestic air travel in the Netherlands and Norway respectively. Although some countries tax the fuel used by domestic aviation, there is no duty on kerosene used on international flights.
ICAO is currently against the inclusion of aviation in the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS). However, the EU is pressing ahead with its plans to include aviation from 2011.

Investigations of air disasters

Most air accident investigations are carried out by an agency of a country that is associated in some way with the accident - for example the Air Accidents Investigation Branch carried out accident investigations on behalf of the British Government. ICAO has however conducted two investigations involving air disasters, both incidents involving passenger airliners shot down while in international flight over hostile territory. The first incident occurred on 21 February 1973, during a period of tension which would lead to the Israeli-Arab "October war", when a Libyan Arab Airlines Flight 114 was shot down by Israeli F-4 jets over the Sinai Peninsula. The second incident occurred on 1 September 1983, during a period of heightened Cold War tension, when a Soviet Su-15 interceptor shot down a straying Korean Air Lines Flight 007 near Moneron Island just west of Sakhalin Island. KAL 007 was carrying 269 people, including 22 children under the age of 12, and a sitting U.S. congressman, Larry McDonald.

The future of flight [EN]

But as the aviation industry looks towards the next 100 years, it will have to confront challenges at least as daunting as those faced by the Wright brothers.
Growth in air travel is expected to soar over the next 30 years and beyond, and there is a real possibility that the aircraft industry will struggle to keep up.
Manufacturers are also under pressure to cut noise and emissions from aircraft. Innovative new technologies may come to the rescue, but only if they satisfy a financial bottom line.

The UK Government estimates growth in passengers at around 4% per year until 2030. Industry forecasts broadly agree with this projection.
"Occasionally, things like the Gulf War and the Sars epidemic slow that down for a short period, but then it goes back up to the same level roughly a year later," says David Velupillai, regional spokesperson for European aircraft manufacturer Airbus.
"Looking to the future, passengers will double every 15 years and triple every 23 years." 

Super-jumbo
Airbus's response to the challenge posed by rising demand is the A380 - a king-size double-decker aircraft able to seat a total of 555 passengers, about 155 more than current jumbos. The A380 will house a lounge, a bar, showers and a gymnasium.

Airbus's A380 jet is the first fully double-decked aircraft

This "super-jumbo" is primarily designed for heavily travelled routes such as London to Singapore, London to New York and Tokyo to Los Angeles.
But at US space agency's (Nasa) Langley Research Center in Virginia, US, researchers have been working on a different vision for the future of aviation.
The Small Aircraft Transportation System (Sats) offers an alternative solution to the problem of burgeoning demand for air travel.
Sats, its originators suggest, would divert pressure away from the "hub-and-spoke" model of air travel. Hub-and-spoke refers to the typically US model of passengers being processed through large "hub" airports and then on to secondary flights to "spoke" airports near their final destination. 

Air-taxis
The vision of Sats is of a nation of air travellers hopping between small airports on a point-to-point, on-demand basis in "air-taxis".
Nasa is designing new aircraft for the job: 4-8-seater passenger jets and looking further to the future, personal air vehicles (PAVs), which it says would be affordable for the general public and self-operated without the need for a pilot.

Looking to the future, passengers will double every 15 years and triple every 23 years David Velupillai, Airbus

Sats aircraft would also use computer display technology called "synthetic vision". This provides a virtual map of the terrain below the aircraft. This will allow pilots to land safely in low-visibility on badly-lit landing strips at small airports.
Engine technology is at the forefront of research into future aircraft. One of the developments we are most likely to see before too long is a move to "all-electric" engines and aircraft.
Conventional aircraft engines provide thrust, hydraulics, pneumatics and electrical power. But engineers envisage hydraulics and pneumatics being replaced by electrical power.
All-electric aircraft engines would provide the aircraft with thrust and act as mini-generators to supply the aircraft with electrical power.
"This would make engines simpler and more efficient," says Martin Johnson, head of communications for civil aerospace at Rolls-Royce. 

Hypersonic planes
The movement towards all-electric aircraft in the commercial sector is a gradual, evolutionary process. But elsewhere, researchers have been working on a new type of engine that has the potential to truly revolutionise air travel.
Hypersonic engines or "scramjets" (supersonic combustion ramjet) would enable aircraft to travel coast-to-coast in the US in about 30 minutes and from London to Sydney in about 90 minutes.

Will we be flying planes like this in a few decades?

Scramjet engines operate at speeds in excess of Mach 5 (five times the speed of sound) and have a simple mechanical design with no moving parts.
They would also permit single-stage-to-orbit space vehicles - spacecraft that fly into space in one piece, something that might bring space tourism within the grasp of the ordinary person and not just billionaires.
Aircraft with new propulsion technology may need to be radically redesigned. One of the most popular concepts of recent years is the "blended-wing-body" design, originally conceived by aerospace corporation McDonnell Douglas.
This design does away with the traditional tube and wing design of modern commercial aircraft, instead opting for merged shape that makes it look like a flying wing.
Its advocates claim that integrating the engines, body and wings into a single lifting surface improves the overall efficiency of the aircraft.
Whether new technologies get taken on will continue to depend on the business case that can be made for them.
But meeting passenger growth and environmental targets for the future means aircraft manufacturers are taking blue-sky thinking seriously, says Johnson.

The matter-anti-matter engine is one propulsion system that has been floated among futurists in the past. But aircraft manufacturers say they're not looking at such things. Not yet, anyway.