Modernisation and digitalisation of air traffic management (ATM) is important in its own right, but it’s also one of the most effective levers aviation can pull to decarbonise. We sat down with Andreas Boschen, executive director of the SESAR 3 Joint Undertaking — SESAR as in Single European Sky ATM Research — to learn more about how the 2024 edition of the European ATM Master Plan is driving forward this agenda.
With over 130 digital solutions delivered as part of SESAR’s innovation and research work, the vast majority of which bring direct and indirect environmental improvements, the programme is already reaping early benefits.
The new version of the Master Plan, Boschen says, “shortlists strategic deployment priorities and associated research and innovation priorities characterising their potential benefits. These are the keys to unlocking the operational efficiencies of tomorrow’s Digital European Sky. The Master Plan is designed to be updated through a collaborative process with our industry partners, to empower decision-makers to navigate Europe’s constantly changing ATM landscape.”
Strategically, the plan aims to both minimise and reduce emissions while also maintaining high standards of operational safety.
“The future design of the system aims to strike the right balance between reducing CO2 and non-CO2 emissions, such as contrails and nitrous oxides (NOx),” Boschen says. “Objective evidence on the non-CO2 effects of aviation is needed to inform policymakers when it comes to define mitigation actions. Until now, emissions targets have been set around carbon — and to a lesser extent NOx — metrics.”
In addition, the consideration of noise and local air quality around airports is becoming increasingly important.
The work is a collaborative effort across the industry, Boschen says. “The stakeholders in this effort, including aircraft manufacturers, solutions providers, airspace users, airports and air navigation service providers – are undertaking a significant collective effort in boosting cooperation and investment to achieve the common goal of reducing aviation’s environmental footprint in line with EU climate objectives. These were set in 2021 and are now EU law, and aim to reduce net greenhouse-gas emissions by at least 55 percent by 2030, relative to 1990 levels.”
Key digitalisation “transformation levers” are at the heart of the new plan
The Master Plan focusses on five principal areas of work, which Boschen calls “transformation levers”, all of which draw heavily on new digital tools.
The first, he explains, is “the use of the precise and continuous trajectory-based operations, whereby data-enriched flight plans will allow aircraft to navigate along fuel-saving routes facilitated by ATM. The switchover to trajectory-based operations is partially underway — for example, some regions within Europe’s airspace already benefit from such SESAR solutions as extended arrivals management and optimised climb operations. The holy grail we’re working towards will be reached when trajectory-based operations are adopted across all fleets and all European airspace. This will bring more predictability into Europe’s airspace network and enable carriers and other airspace users to curb their climate impact while reducing fuel consumption and bringing economic efficiency.”
The second lever is something of a prerequisite for this optimisation: improving data flows and insights through the use of digital technologies like big data analytics, AI, and machine learning.
For the third lever, Boschen says, “Automation will play an increasing role too, especially in areas of replacing voice interactions between flight crews and the ground. Use of datalink and multilink technologies, for example, is already enabling swifter exchanges of mission-critical data while minimising the risks of misinterpretation of ATC instructions.”
Automation will also be part of the fourth lever, the evolution of the role of air traffic controllers via research, testing, piloting and eventual wider adoption of digitalisation elements like automation and augmented reality.
“While we keep the ever-important ‘human in the loop’, automation will be introduced for non-complex situations — where it adds to safety and efficiency,” Boschen explains. “Where we have operating methods that use higher levels of automation we will rely on the intuitive design of the system, but we will still maintain a human presence in the loop.”
The fifth lever is dynamic airspace configuration to improve the management of flexible sector boundaries, which in some cases cross national borders. The patchwork of ATM across Europe is in many ways ripe for reform and improvement, so this will be important work.
This lever, Boschen notes, “will enable us to pool the totality of civil and military airspace, resulting in a more collaborative environment using shared, safer, more coordinated and more efficient ATM resources.”
New market segments underline the need for strong future planning
ATM will also need to incorporate the new generation of advanced air mobility, including remotely piloted vehicles, uncrewed autonomous aircraft, high-altitude vehicles, a new generation of airships, hybrid-electric or hydrogen aircraft, eVTOLs, air taxis and other new vehicles.
“This interoperable and more complex airspace will require new talent to manage this diverse traffic, and also means that high levels of digitalisation will be necessary to ensure safe and efficient harmonisation,” Boschen says. Our European ATM Master Plan, since its first iteration, has taken interoperability and airspace capacity into account. But in light of new events in the last few years we’re now also thinking ahead to how we might cope with the unforeseeable. Consequently, we’re taking further preemptive steps to maintain resilience when black swan events occur such as pandemics and sudden workforce incapacitation, climate change events, wide-scale power outages, cyber-attacks at wide scale, or geopolitical events, like war, which directly impact our airspace.”
Reaching this digital future will require not just an evolution of technology but also an evolution of the technology stack that underpins aviation. Cloud operations will allow easier and more reliable scaling, and together with other elements of the digitalisation agenda also enable virtual ATM centres, which in turn enable benefits like delegated airspace and dynamic controller capacity.
Across the spectrum of ATM improvements, collaboration is vital now, Boschen reiterates, because “whereas the next generation of low-and-zero-emission air vehicles and the introduction of SAF will dramatically cut aviation’s impact on the planet, it will likely take another decade before these initiatives can be deployed at a scale that will help us reach the EU’s climate targets. By contrast, SESAR’s digitalisation and automation solutions are available immediately to bring relief from aviation’s climate impacts.
Author: John Walton
Published: 29th July 2024
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