Europe, through the High Level Group on Aviation Research, ACARE and the Commission, has a vision for air transport in meeting societal & market needs over the coming 30 years. Central to this is time efficiency, meaning reduced door-to-door journey times, seamless inter-modal connections and reliability. For this Europe will engage in large scale, intensive and coordinated research & innovation. Stakeholders need a full picture of what research is being conducted, of gaps present and how EU funded R&I meets ACARE goals. CATER will be an R&I observatory and policy centre run by an expert group with deep industry knowledge, access to a network of all relevant organisations and excellent information gathering and knowledge management processes and tools. CATER will deliver valuable and insightful reports and recommendations, packaged and disseminated effectively. CATER will conduct an annual review of the state of the art of R&I, identify gaps in the landscape and bottlenecks to innovation and formulate strategic recommendations to address these. It shall review the landscape in the context of the six Activities of the Specific Programme and the Strategic Research & Innovation Agenda of ACARE. It shall provide a dashboard of relevant funding programmes. It shall complement SESAR and other EU research coordination initiatives. CATER will develop a web-site, tool-set and knowledge base that centralises and updates information by way of advanced automated web search tools. The centre shall act as network hub for time efficiency stakeholders enabling them supply and harvest relevant knowledge. Dissemination of the reports and findings shall be through consultation with stakeholder leaders and through the online platform, workshops, outbound communications and piggy-backing on industry events and organisations. The assets developed by CATER are designed for the long term and to be assimilated into some permanent organisation when CATER comes to a close.