Read our series of interviews with the people who are making the Yocova platform come alive. Here we speak to Andreas Boschen, Executive Director at SESAR 3 Joint Undertaking about SESAR’s vision of a Digital European Sky, the research and projects SESAR is working on, the sustainability benefits they bring, and his thoughts on the future of aviation
Andreas Boschen, Executive Director
Andreas Boschen is Executive Director at SESAR 3 Joint Undertaking (SESAR 3 JU), an institutionalised EU partnership between private and public sector partners across the European aviation sector. The purpose of the SESAR 3 JU is to research and innovate to support the delivery of the Digital European Sky
Boschen sits down with aviation journalist John Walton to explain more about the partnership, its research and solutions, how these support the industry’s efforts to be more sustainable, and what he thinks aviation and airspace will look like in the future.
What is SESAR 3 and what is a joint undertaking?
“SESAR is an acronym which stands for Single European Sky Air Traffic Management Research. We are a joint undertaking and an EU institution established by EU law, and we bring together both private and public partners. We have 55 members across the European aviation sector including airlines, airports, air navigation service providers (ANSPs), the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation (known as EUROCONTROL), and research organisations, plus new entrants like drones.
Our members have pulled together resources and collectively invest in air traffic management research and innovation over the coming years, and the SESAR 3 JU is committed to invest €1.6 billion up until 2030. We’re already well up and running and have more than 50 research projects underway, which feed into our research agenda and innovation pipeline. We work on a co-creation model, with our members approaching challenges and innovation opportunities from a bottom-up perspective. We’re also open and transparent, and have many more participants involved including SMEs [small and medium-sized enterprises], universities and academia, and we welcome new interested parties to get involved. We’re also conducting open research, so all our results are published on our website, meaning our findings are available for implementation not just in Europe, but beyond.
There are already more than 120 SESAR solutions that are ready for deployment, and 70 of these have already been deployed in Europe. We have a digital catalogue of our solutions available online, so I encourage anyone interested to take a look at that.”
How do you manage such a diverse range of contributors?
“It’s all about a cooperative spirit really. Our members have taken the decision to commit to working together and that’s what we’re all doing daily. Our strategic vision is to bring about a Digital European Sky and we’re all committed to that, but then there are also representatives from our member organisations, together with universities and research centres, working together on specific projects. We have, for example, an air traffic control operator sitting next to a research engineer or a data engineer, collaborating and finding implementable solutions that can be deployed in the coming years to make our European sky safer, more efficient, and more sustainable. That’s really great to see!”
What are the most recent successes and challenges you’ve experienced?
“There are two key areas of research we’ve been doing over the past few years. The first is about free route airspace in Europe, which is around how we can better use the airspace available. Obviously, we only have one airspace above us and there are many different players wanting to use it, such as civil, military and general aviation, but in the future, we will see others wanting to enter that space such as drones, balloons and others. So, to manage this better and make more capacity available, in Europe we’ve already rolled out free route airspace overnight and in the day, as well as a cross-border dimension. What this means is that an airline or airspace user defines an entry and exit point, but within the rest of the airspace the pilot can fly freely, and this is a good thing.
Another example, which is already very much in deployment, is around extended arrival management. When planes are heading towards their destination airport, we’re planning miles ahead to prepare them and put them into a nice lineup. Currently we can do this from 200 nautical miles before an aircraft reaches the airport, but we have plans to extend this capability up to 500 nautical miles. This is a good distance, because the more you can plan, the better you can manage the airspace, but this of course does need to meet cross-border requirements and that’s why we’d like to see a European airspace. It’s all about data really, and helping air traffic management to be more data-driven is one of the things we’re working on. Data is exchanged in multiple ways, such as ground to ground, air to ground and several other communication and satellite technologies. So, in this multi-link environment, there’s a huge amount of information and data available, which if shared in close to real time, can help to achieve the best trajectory for the aircraft to fly in a less constrained way. But of course, we never compromise on safety and what we are aiming to do will increase safety further. We work closely with the European Union Aviation Safety Agency, which is the EU regulator, and ensure that any solutions brought into the industry are within the regulatory framework.”
How do you balance advanced technology against legacy technology?
“We see the problem with legacy technology in the industry and that it’s something that needs to be tackled, but it’s a bit beyond our remit. We’re not an air navigation service provider (ANSP) or an airline running its own complex IT architecture where you have layers upon layers of technology. I heard from one ANSP that they have around 300 different systems working together, which is incredible, but of course we cannot manage or copy that. But what we can do, and are doing, is to show technological solutions, which are ready to be deployed and help the end users to integrate them. We help them to meet industry standards and regulations, bringing peace of mind from a safety and interoperability perspective. We also help them with rulemaking in Europe as well as with rolling out equipment and infrastructure in a harmonised and synchronised way. Our ANSP members are also reviewing their own IT infrastructure, addressing legacy layers and moving towards a more modern IT system architecture where you can also have plug-in services and systems. This works very nicely with our research projects, so we are offering solutions that can be easily plugged into existing ANSP systems.
In terms of new technology, there are a couple of really important areas we’re working on. Drones are of course a very fascinating subject, and this is clearly a market we will be seeing a lot more of over the coming years, and how we will integrate these into airspace will be on the minds of many in the aviation sector and beyond. We’re not talking about the small types of drones that kids might be playing with, rather commercial drones, or drones doing public service tasks such as delivering emergency medical equipment, monitoring forest fires, or supporting the police, to name just a few. In fact, we have a very interesting project underway, which is looking at the feasibility of using drones to deliver urgent medical equipment between say a laboratory and a hospital, which is a fantastic way to avoid traffic congestion and make the delivery much faster. Then there are other areas for drone services which are being developed, such as air taxis, so the vertical take-off vehicles are coming. There are already plans for flights at the Paris Olympics, plus plans to fly them in Italy, Shanghai in China and in Japan. One of the things we need to do is to ensure that these flights are safe and can be integrated and managed in the overall airspace.
Another good example of new technology is the remote air traffic control tower. Traditionally we think of air traffic operators sitting in tall towers at or near airports with binoculars, but the technology has evolved, and they can use digital technology to get a much better picture to manage the runway. This means that they no longer need to be confined to the tower location and can manage operations from a remote centre. This has already been deployed in Norway, Sweden and Germany, and at London City Airport.”
Which forthcoming SESAR solutions will be featured in the catalogue?
“As I mentioned, we have a clear vision of a Digital European Sky, where there’s enough airspace for all users, whether that’s airlines, the military or other players such as drones. A good example of one of the solutions in our catalogue is around virtualisation. Currently all communication navigation surveillance (CNS) infrastructure such as radar is very localised in air traffic control centres. What we’re looking to do is de-centralise the data and virtualise it so that it can be used and managed at multiple centres if necessary. What this means is that air traffic doesn’t need to be managed in a location next to, for example, an airport, but can instead be managed up to, say, a couple of hundred miles away.
Another area is sustainability, because this a very important topic in aviation. The industry is committed to decarbonise and we really need to make the green trajectory happen so that planes can fly as fuel and emission efficiently as possible. We’re of course waiting for sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs) and hydrogen or electric-powered aircraft, but this will take time, perhaps 10 to 15 years to reach a reasonable scale. But air traffic management is one area that can bring about immediate benefits in terms of sustainability. We have around 100 solutions that if deployed, would result in, we estimate, 4% of emissions saved. And of course, fewer emissions means less fuel burned, which means lower costs for airlines, so the reduction in fuel emissions also brings about financial benefits.
And then the sustainability agenda is not simply about emissions, it also applies to noise. We know that’s a tricky issue between local communities and airports, so we have developed solutions on how to fly in and out of airports to help to manage that. Contrails are another topic we’re working on, and there will be some interesting research and discussion over the coming years to establish what the effects of contrails are on climate change and what we can do to avoid them.”
What do you think aviation will look like in 2040
“First of all, I should talk about our innovation pipeline process, because this sets the framework for all our future projects and research. Basically, at first, we undertake exploratory research to check the value of an initial idea and then undertake feasibility studies. Once this has been established and agreed, we then undertake industrial research where we work through technical readiness and bring our research up to what we call an ‘industrialisation standard’, so they have all been validated in a research environment and are ready to be deployed. After that we test our solutions in our virtual digital sky environment. The latest project we’ve worked on underwent 30,000 test flights using real-time data to make our research as concrete as possible. We also have a sister organisation called the SESAR Deployment Manager, which is mandated by the European Commission, so all our solutions are rolled out in a harmonised way in line with EU regulations. The point here is that our research takes around six to nine years, so it requires quite a bit of time.
image courtesy of SESARJU – www.sesarju.eu
In terms of what I foresee for the future, I think we’ll have an airspace where all users can find their place. We’ll have much higher levels of automation and I think the data we’ll produce and exchange will be so vast that it will no longer be able to be managed by only humans. We’ll have new tools to deal with this, we’ll have machine learning, artificial intelligence and of course cloud computing playing a much bigger role. I’d like to stress, though, that automation will not be introduced to take the place of or work against humans, but rather the contrary. Automation will help humans do their jobs more efficiently and safely, and free up time to focus on other significant issues.”
What would you say to someone considering a career in aviation?
“It’s a really interesting industry at the moment, particularly as we move to a more data-driven or data-centric approach, and I think there will be some very exciting developments over the coming years. I’d strongly advise anyone who’s interested and any engineer students to consider a career in air traffic management.”
Author: Yocova, with special thanks to John Walton
Published 12 September 2023
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