2023 in aviation is set to be a year like no other. As the aviation industry accelerates out of the COVID-19 downturn, we reflect on how the pandemic’s effects — and the three years since 2019 — have changed aviation forever. To understand the dynamics around the changes to flight operations, we spoke with ATM trade group CANSA, airline association ERA, and ATM provider NATS for the most recent in our ongoing eight-article series.
The future of flight operations is a more efficient, more technological, and more collaborative world than three years ago. The COVID-10 pandemic changed this part of the industry fundamentally, and we sat down to discuss its prospects with with Simon Hocquard, director general of air traffic management industry association CANSO, European Regions Airlines Association director general Monserrat Barriga, and Andy Taylor, chief solution officer for digital towers at air traffic management specialists NATS.
The impact of the pandemic, lockdowns and travel restrictions affected the aviation industry in ways innumerable, some of which continue today. NATS’ Taylor tells us that, in the flight operations world, “it particularly has affected the way that people see aviation and the way that people use aviation. So it’s having a huge impact on air traffic service provision.”
“We’re seeing significant growth now at a lot of airports,” he says. “This is the sort of growth where major hubs, which have seen it organically grow for many years previously, are now experiencing the kind of boom that, say, regional airports did in the early 2000s with the low cost carriers. We’re also seeing airports having different patterns of traffic, different operators, different frequencies.”
With overflight bans, regional disparities in travel restrictions, conflict zones, air traffic management staffing, plus new and differently shaped capacity and demand — the upswing in flight operations in 2023 is its own beast.
“It’s not even necessarily an exact return to 2019,” Taylor says. “It’s something similar, but different.”
CANSO head Simon Hocquard concurs. “Some things have returned back to where they were, with passenger’s desire to fly very strong in many parts of the world. Some of the global air traffic flows are still slow to return, for example to and from the Asia Pacific region to the rest of the world,” he tells us.
New systems, technologies and processes are improving flight operations
Managing this return — or rather the growth to a new normal — is requiring not just the development and application of new technologies, but the wider adoption of pre-pandemic processes and working with other parts of the industry in new ways.
When it comes to technologies and processes, CANSO’s Hocquard says, “one great example is flow management which enables airports, ANSPs, and airlines to work together to optimise flights by sharing information on potential inefficiencies and delays on the runway and in the air, saving airlines from wasting unnecessary time and fuel burn.”
“Collaboration between ANSPs and the military has also been a key focus since the pandemic,” he notes. “Outstanding civil-military collaboration identified flexible solutions to the new security reality in Europe, ensuring an efficient balance between Security and Commercial interests and minimising the impact of airspace closures on civil air traffic flows. CANSO is focused on strengthening collaborations like these by engaging with organisations like NATO to determine how best to manage our airspace, ensure standards are harmonised, interoperability enhanced and facilitating the real time exchange of data and information between military and civil service providers.”
A return to air routes that in some cases resemble those of the Cold War — when was the last time a Tokyo-London flight flew east over the United States? — is not the only political reality with which aviation must engage.
Montserrat Barriga, director general of the European Regions Airlines Association, tells us that, “for some time, regional aviation has been finding itself at a crossroads between innovation and the political and public pressure to reduce passenger volumes.”
To that end, the recent approval by the European Commission of France’s bans on shorthaul flights where a train journey of less than two and a half hours exists means that some routes — Paris to Lyon for example — may only be sold as part of a connecting journey, and presently affect only flights from Paris to Nantes, Lyon and Bordeaux.
As a result, Barriga says, “the regional sector is finding itself justifying its very purpose of existence: providing connectivity.”
With its typically shorter flights and often smaller aircraft, it is also serving as a testbed for new green technologies.
“Our members have embraced this full-heartedly, with many companies leading the way in future technologies that will achieve zero-emission aviation, such as manufacturers AURA AERO, ZeroAvia, Universal Hydrogen, and Heart Aerospace,” Barriga tells us. “Hybrid electric technology is now being used today for test flights, with commercial use of electric or hybrid-electric passenger aircraft expected in in the next decade. Additionally, SAF [more sustainable aviation fuel] is being used commercially, and synthetic jet fuel made from CO2 is currently being developed, which would use carbon captured from the air, making it carbon neutral. In June this year, regional aircraft manufacturer ATR and Swedish airline Braathens Regional Airlines — both ERA members — collaborated to enable the first ever 100 per cent SAF-powered test flight on a commercial aircraft.”
Collaboration and new ways of thinking are also vital
It is a rare week that goes by in aviation without multiple announcements where airline X or airframer Y is working with new fuel technology Z, or has agreed to purchase so many million litres of a more sustainable fuel. The trends from this collaboration remain fascinating to observe.
“One of the most significant positive changes that emerged during the pandemic and is continuing at pace, is that the whole of the aviation ecosystem collectively decided to work together on a sustainable future for aviation,” CANSO’s Simon Hocquard emphasises. “We recognise that we all need to improve the efficiency of aviation in the face of growing traditional traffic levels as well as the emergence of a high number of new airspace users, all requiring different services. This was the catalyst for CANSO creating the Complete Air Traffic System Global Council — an innovation forum with leaders from 70 global organisations including Airbus, Boeing, Wing and NASA, which recently launched its vision and roadmap for the skies of 2045.”
“One of the key lessons learned during the pandemic,” Hocquard observes, “was that those organisations that proved to be scalable on the downside of the traffic downturn didn’t turn out to be scalable on the upside too. We must not lose sight of this. We need to develop a future airspace system that is fully scalable and that can flex up or down according to demand.”
Developing this flexibility within an industry with a strong safety and regulatory background will be as complex as it will be critical. It will require a new way of thinking strategically about the industry and how it adjusts to externalities.
During the pandemic, NATS’ Taylor says, “while I think businesses, airports, and the industry have had time to reflect, has been a switch in reflection from managing today and firefighting, to actually having a chance to think about what they need for the future. With that new mindset — it may not be continuous growth forever, it may actually be booms and busts, it may be all sorts of things — I think businesses, airports, and airlines are trying to prepare themselves to be more flexible in future as well.”
Author: John Walton
Published 17th January 2023
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