Next-generation air traffic management has proven massively complicated, and that has been especially true in Europe where the unique split of pooled and national sovereignty over air traffic control has proven contentious, even while the continent grew to represent over a quarter of the entire world market before COVID-19.
With its third technology portfolio programme adopted [PDF], to demystify exactly what next-generation air traffic management is — and to learn where we are and what the prospects are for the future — we sat down with the SESAR JU executive director, Florian Guillermet.
(Bear with us on the acronyms: this next-generation R&D work is managed by the SESAR JU, the SESAR Joint Undertaking, a public private partnership implementing the Single European Sky ATM Research [SESAR] programme, where ATM is Air Traffic Management.)
“For more than 10 years the SESAR JU has worked to improve the environmental footprint of air traffic management, from CO2 and non-CO2 emissions, to noise and local air quality,” Guillermet explains. “The programme is examining every phase of flight and use of the airspace, and seeing what technologies can be used to eliminate fuel inefficiencies. It is also investing in synchronised data exchange and operations on the ground and in the air to ensure maximum impact. To date the SESAR JU has delivered over 90 solutions over half of which are part of implementation plans offering direct and indirect benefits for the environment.”
These solutions span four primary categories: high-performing airport operations, advanced air traffic services, optimised ATM network services, and enabling aviation infrastructure. They comprise everything from remote towers to deicing management, multi-airport arrival management to user-preferred routing, and even variable profile military reserved areas and enhanced civil-military collaboration through to meteorological information exchange and ADS-B aircraft surveillance on the ground and in the air.
And that’s just a snippet of what’s been delivered so far.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chx27ZrlPoM
“When SESAR research and innovation got going over 10 years ago, we sought to answer the question: can technology contribute to better performing air traffic management?” Guillermet explains. “A lot has been done since then that shows that, yes, technology can improve the performance of ATM, allowing for smarter air traffic service provision that caters for conventional aircraft as well as new entrants in all types of airspace, including very low-level and high altitude operations.”
Those technologies are continually evolving, and have certainly done so over the last ten years, a time of great technological change in every industry. And they show promise, with satellites, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and big data all enabling systems to become more connected, scalable, automated, adaptive and resilient.
The plans are contained within the European ATM Master Plan, which is essentially a roadmap for the future of the air traffic management sector’s modernisation. But where were we ten years ago when SESAR all started, and why is this problem so pressing?
“The limitations of the system are closely related to how the system evolved over time,” Guillermet explains. “When air traffic control centres were first set up in Europe within each State, they were built close to radars or radio antennas, within the line of sight of flying aircraft. As traffic increased, the airspace above the centres was divided into an ever-increasing number of adjacent sectors, allowing controllers to manage the aircraft safely at any given time. The system today still relies on this sectorised approach to manage traffic in Europe. As a result, the system is fragmented and geographically constrained and cannot accommodate changes in traffic demand dynamically.”
These are, in many ways, different fundamental challenges to those faced by the US FAA with its NextGen modernisation programme, and by other equivalent authorities and actors worldwide. With competing national interests, there is an argument that solving the problem in Europe has been about finding technological ways around geopolitical problems almost as much as the hard technical questions.
“Thankfully there is a will to change and understanding that to be more resilient, ATM will need to be less geographically specific with more horizontal interaction between all the players: the air navigation service providers, the Network Manager, the airports, etc,” Guillermet says. “This is where technology comes into play, offering solutions to allow for a more dynamic and agile management of traffic. Above all, the biggest lesson learnt is that collaboration is key: no one stakeholder can go it alone, particularly now with the fallout from the pandemic.“
Enter the technology, with more than sixty options laid out in 2019’s third-edition SESAR Solution Catalogue, including many that are being deployed at the regional and European level.
But for critical national, transnational and international infrastructure, progress has been slow — understandable in some ways given the requirement for 24/7 uptime, the aviation industry’s safety focus, and the amount of legacy technology that must be replaced.
However, Guillermet says, “the COVID crisis has heightened calls to accelerate the implementation, recognising the relevance of our digital solutions to help the sector build back better. Efforts are being made as part of the EU’s regulatory framework to encourage early movers to get moving, rewarding those who invest in new technologies, especially those that will facilitate an environmentally and economically sustainable recovery.”
Indeed, the impetus of the European Commission’s European Green Deal, launched in late 2019, seeks to accelerate the bloc to climate neutrality by 2050, which will require what Guillermet calls “deep-rooted change across the aviation sector.”
“Considering the urgency of the situation, the SESAR JU is working to accelerate the digital transformation through large-scale demonstrators, which are key to bridging the industrialisation gap, bringing these innovations to scale and encouraging rapid implementation by industry,” Guillermet notes. “Such large-scale efforts have started now and will also be the focus in the future, with the ambition to reduce by 2035 average CO2 emissions per flight by 0.8-1.6 tonnes, taking into account the entire flight from gate to gate, including the airport.”
In addition, a new research and innovation portfolio, the SESAR 3 Joint Undertaking, will concentrate on the latest innovations: next-gen communications links, urban air mobility, unpiloted air traffic, AI, machine learning, data sharing, data services, and more.
But it’s fascinating to hear Guillermet talk about how the solutions to European ATM have evolved to fix the problems beyond simply those of technology. “The blockers are not so much technological as historical” in the European context, he says. Ensuring that the social and political will to implement the technologies that resolve them may turn out to be just as important as the technological advances themselves.
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