Oceanic Errors in the North Atlantic

ICAO has updated its “Oceanic Errors” NAT Ops Bulletin – the doc which has all the advice for operators on how to avoid the common mistakes when flying the North Atlantic.

These include: Gross Nav Errors, Large Height Deviations, and Longitudinal Separation busts. There’s also some advice on Flight Planning, SLOP, and some datalink things to watch out for.

You can download the NAT Ops Bulletin here.

Click to download PDF

Looks like there are no significant changes in terms of content for this updated version when compared with the old one – they’ve just tidied it up a bit. But if you operate over the North Atlantic it’s still worth a read, as there’s lots of top tips on how to avoid the most common “gotchas”!

In the earlier revision to this doc back in Jan 2021, they talked about changes to the Contingency and Weather Deviation Procedures, to reflect the new procedures that were introduced on the NAT in March 2019 and then extended to all oceanic airspace worldwide in Nov 2020:

Click to open hi-res version.

For more info on these Contingency and Weather Deviation Procedures, check out our article here.

Oceanic Errors in the North Atlantic