Europe’s SESAR 3 Joint Undertaking is as complex as its acronym, and even more important. The JU is a public-private partnership implementing the Single European Sky Air Traffic Management Research project, with more than a hundred initiatives — many of them digital — to improve air traffic management (ATM)
We last checked in with the programme two years ago, so we took some time with executive director Andreas Boschen to bring you an in-depth update on the impressive progress that the JU is making.
“The biggest development,” Boschen tells us, “has been the launch of the SESAR 3 Joint Undertaking in December 2021 within the framework of Horizon Europe, the EU research and innovation programme. Bringing together the EU, Eurocontrol, and organisations covering the entire aviation value chain, including drones, this new European partnership will invest more than EUR 1.6 billion between now and 2030 to accelerate, through research and innovation, the delivery of an inclusive, resilient and sustainable Digital European Sky.”
The goal: creating aviation infrastructure that is fit for the digital age, while in the short term achieving crucial early contributions to the net zero agenda.
More than seventy projects will be brought into the programme’s solutions catalogue, aiming to deliver over one hundred digital improvements for conventional aircraft air traffic operations, both in the air and on the ground. These are loosely grouped into four themes:
- high-performing aircraft operations
- advanced air traffic services
- optimised ATM network services
- enabling aviation infrastructure
This joint undertaking, the third, is a major expansion of the agenda — and the participants. Beyond the fifty founding members, the European Commission (representing the EU), Eurocontrol, uncrewed aerial systems operators, airspace users and smaller airports beyond major hubs, the new JU comes with a greater representation from players across the continent’s aviation industry.
“In addition to a more diverse and enlarged membership,” Boschen explains, “the other important difference is the mechanisms that we have put in place within the programme to accelerate the innovation lifecycle and fast-track the most promising solutions through large scale demonstrators, to encourage market uptake by would-be pioneers in the industry.”
At the end of the day, he notes, “the aviation sector has to accelerate its transition to a sustainable and digital future, and we believe that these structural changes to how we innovate should allow for greater agility, speed and ultimately the digital transformation on which we are all banking.”
New partnerships are a hallmark of the third JU
A critical part of the programme is to work more closely with agencies and bodies responsible for standards and regulation. This includes closer working between the JU’s deployment manager and the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and standards nonprofit the European Organisation for Civil Aviation Equipment (EUROCAE).
“Also critical will be creating new synergies between research and innovation activities at European and national level, which will be facilitated with the establishment of a States’ Representative Group,” Boschen says, the purpose of which will be “to monitor the progress of the JU in line with Horizon Europe and the Commission’s top priorities, including the Sustainable and Smart Mobility Strategy, the European Green Deal and A Europe fit for the digital age.”
The programme’s methodologies include focussing on numerous technology pathways with the aim of moving forward on multiple projects in parallel. This include satellite technologies (in partnership with EGNOS, the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service, and Galileo), artificial intelligence, augmented reality, virtualisation and other technological innovations.
“Air traffic management is an ideal candidate for greater automation and augmentation through artificial intelligence,” Boschen emphasises. “With their repetitive procedures generating huge amounts of data, aviation and ATM can make use of AI and higher levels of automation to improve the efficiency of their operations in many ways and allow human operators to focus on safety-critical tasks. Machine learning digital assistants can mine huge amounts of historical data to support human operators in taking the best possible decisions. Automated marketplaces can help airlines define flight allocations without revealing commercially sensitive pricing data. And a better understanding of passenger journeys can build the framework for seamless multimodal travel.”
There are of course questions of AI ethics and the inherent nature of ATM as centred around both safety and humans, which will require higher levels of trust and transparency than in almost any other setting. There is an opportunity for real innovation in the AI field here, and for players that develop trusted AI for aviation to be able to repurpose those levels of trust elsewhere in industry and society.
Key research portfolios are bringing early results
Early groupings of initiatives include virtual air traffic management centres that in essence unbundle the services that manage air traffic — like flight data, radar, weather, and so on — and remove the need for them to be located in the same location as the controller and control centre. This brings redundancy, efficiency and flexibility: a win all around, with remote towers implemented not just at rural and remote airports but also at sites like London City.
“A research portfolio that has yielded incredible results is on U-space, the ecosystem under development,” Boschen tells us, “which will allow drones to operate at scale. We have tested and trialled intensively solutions aimed at showing the readiness of U-space to manage a broad range of drone operations and related applications, and their interaction with manned aviation. These range from parcel deliveries between urban areas, medical emergencies and police interventions, as well as air taxi trials in controlled airspace around airports. An important output of the research programme was an updated and consolidated concept of operations for U-space, now including urban air mobility (UAM). Proof of our success is that the deployment of U-space is taking place progressively based on increasing availability of blocks of services and enabling technologies.”
Sustainability is a major theme, with the climate emergency and the EU Green Deal agenda both adding pressure for action by the industry. Here, ATM presents a series of quick wins in flight and ground operations through reducing airborne and airport emissions, by cutting taxi time, routing more efficiently — and more environmentally where this is different — and reducing the non-CO2 emissions of flights.
“The recurring lesson learned from all our work is that collaboration is key,” Boschen highlights. “No one organisation or country can bring about the digital transformation of air traffic management alone. It requires close cooperation between all the stakeholders that contribute to air traffic management, from the European and national decision-makers that regulate it, the organisations and staff that operate it, to the academic and industry stakeholders that research, design and manufacture it. The way in which our partnership [is designed] means that we have all the stakeholders on-board and can pool the critical mass of resources and expertise needed to deliver the Digital European Sky.”
Author: John Walton
Published 14th February 2023
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