Continuous Climb and Descent Operations

Continuous Climb and Descent Operations (CCO and CDO) are aircraft operating techniques enabled by airspace design, instrument procedure design and facilitated by Air Traffic Control (ATC).

CCO and CDO allow aircraft to follow a flexible, optimum flight path that delivers major environmental and economic benefits - reduced fuel burn, gaseous emissions, noise and fuel costs - without any adverse effect on safety (see ICAO Doc 9993 and ICAO Doc 9931).

CCO and CDO operations allow arriving or departing aircraft to descend or climb continuously, to the greatest extent possible. Aircraft applying CCO employ optimum climb engine thrust and climb speeds until reaching their cruising levels. With CDO, aircraft employ minimum engine thrust, ideally in a low drag configuration, prior to the final approach fix. These techniques result in more time being spent at more fuel-efficient higher cruising levels, hence significantly reducing fuel burn and lowering emissions and fuel costs.

Benefits

Deployment of optimised CCO and CDO throughout Europe will be beneficial to all European ATM system stakeholders and will help the network to address the environmental challenges it faces.

The results of EUROCONTROL studies (scroll down for more information) have shown that on average the benefit of optimising CCO/CDO would result in fuel savings of up to 350,000 tonnes of fuel (1m tonnes+ CO2) or 150+ million €. In addition, using CDO can reduce noise by 1-5dB compared to a non-CDO operation. (Source: European Joint Industry CDA Action Plan).