Hopes and fears as ATM is transformed

Launched in 2004, Single European Sky air traffic management research (SESAR) is a European Commission project managed by the SESAR joint undertaking (SESARJU) organisation.

Three years later, in 2007, the United States government started funding its NextGen process, which is overseen by its Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

Upgrading European and American air traffic management (ATM) is expected to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars in savings for their respective societies. With air traffic set to double by 2020, improvements are also viewed as a necessity simply to stop a worldwide systemic logjam.

For the technology providers there will be greater opportunities as other regions in the Middle East, India and the Far East follow step and update their ATM systems.

According to the 2011 Deloitte study ‘Transforming the Air Transportation System: A business case for program acceleration’, by 2035 savings of hundreds of millions of dollars will be accrued from NextGen and SESAR, with the overall economy gaining a third of it, airlines a further third and passengers the final third.
What both SESAR and NextGen have in common is that they promise to transform the global air transport system by introducing satellite-based positioning, navigation and timing technology, real-time digital data communications, advanced weather sensing and other precision navigation technologies.

The International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) is overseeing co-operation between NextGen and SESAR.
Despite the fact the new technology is predicted to deliver huge societal savings by the EC, FAA and Deloitte, both NextGen and SESAR have been criticised for delays, for what the eventual cost might be for industry and for not being given enough resources by their respective governments.
However, it is the Europeans that are facing a situation where, ten years after SESAR began, research will still be on-going. This is causing uncertainty for the end-users that will have to buy SESAR-derived equipment and concerns about the eventual cost.
The Association of European Airlines (AEA) said the expected cost of introducing SESAR technology for its members was “€8 billion for commercial aviation, around a €1.3 million retrofit cost per aircraft. Payback is only foreseen within seven years and this depends on other partners (the air navigation service providers) delivering their part”.
Part of the reason for this cost is that the development of the equipment, the “industrialisation” of the research, as the EC calls it, has yet to take place and the actual timetable is not clear. The SESARJU said: “SESAR will move into industrialisation as soon as the projects are mature enough, which hopefully will be fully in line with our proposed timing. The 2016 timeline is a date for the current lifetime of the SESARJU and not related to the industrialisation, per se.”
Thales would be in a prime position to exploit SESAR for its own products. The French company has a prominent role in SESAR because it has been selected to co-lead the three work packages dedicated to the development of the new generation of ATC systems that will be the backbone of the European ATM network.

Thales joined SESARJU in 2009. It describes its SESAR role “as the lead manufacturing industry investor in SESAR… involved in 159 different projects”.
Yet the company is not as clear in its explanation when asked when it expects to have SESAR-developed equipment it can sell? It said: “SESAR will lead to the definition of new air and ground ATM standards, which will represent new operational and technical ATM systems and airborne equipment baselines. Thales plans to offer equipment and systems that meet new ATM standards as soon as market demand is established. In Europe, this will be performance-driven and determined by mandates and implementing rules, which will have to be applied by air navigation services providers and aircraft operators.”
The fact that SESARJU is not associated with the industrialisation of the research is another concern for the airlines, which are looking ahead at the deployment phase that was planned to start in 2014.
In a joint September 2011 statement, a coalition of aviation organisations made clear their opposition to EC plans for deployment. The coalition consists of the European Regions Airline Association, the AEA, International Air Transport Association, European Business Aviation Association, European Low Fares Airline Association and the International Air Carrier Association. They said: “Airspace users fundamentally oppose the concept of a contracted deployment manager. Such a concept raises legal questions with regard to the compatibility with [Single European Sky] regulations. A private set-up would never be capable of resolving the critical issue of conflict of interests, nor would it have the required enforcement power.” Instead, the coalition wants a revised SESARJU to oversee deployment.
Thales commented: “European public funding and a deployment governance structure should be approved and implemented as quickly as possible to enable initial deployments across Europe in the next two to three years.”
Meanwhile, the FAA’s NextGen is already seeing some technology deployed. Raytheon’s terminal data distribution system (TDDS) is in use by the FAA.

The TDDS integrates data from a number of ATC tower and airport systems using the FAA’s system-wide information management (SWIM) infrastructure. SWIM is viewed as a key enabler of NextGen and there is a SESAR equivalent SWIM that it is in development.
Another product that is being developed is Raytheon’s ground-based sense-and-avoid technology for unmanned air vehicles, also known as drones. This, according to the company, is going through concept evaluation with a US customer. “It is designed to provide military and civil air traffic controllers with the capability to avoid airborne hazards around unmanned aircraft systems.”
Because of the inherently global nature of air transport, interoperability of the US systems being deployed now and the European technologies that will arrive later this decade is a key part of the FAA and SESARJU’s work. The FAA said: “We’ve been working closely with SESAR for a few years now. In technical terms the MoU with the European Commission has been signed and formal co-ordination activities under the SESAR annex have begun.”

Under the MoU, work began between the FAA and SESAR on data communications.
SESARJU said: “The interoperability work is progressing according to a set of priorities and will result in resolution of where operational procedures or technologies need to be “identical” in content, or where they may need to be “dissimilar” but compatible in content, and where changes need to be synchronised in time between NextGen and SESAR in order to support or achieve interoperability. This work will be co-ordinated at an ICAO level to ensure appropriate links and compliance with the global block upgrades activity.”
Marion Blakey, president and chief executive officer of the Aerospace Industries Association of America, is also a former administrator of the FAA. She said: “ICAO is providing tremendous leadership in this area and I’m privileged to participate on the future of aviation challenge team that is helping to move this process forward. ICAO’s new framework relies heavily upon industry involvement at the technical level, as well, and places several US companies on centre stage for the global harmonisation process.”
At that technical level Blakey points to US and European firms that are already collaborating. “Airbus, as a part of Boeing’s System Engineering-2020 team, has been selected to provide ATM and performance-based navigation expertise for FAA’s greener skies initiative,” Blakey said.

Thales added it was performing R&D activities related to SESAR-NextGen interoperability, future avionics and ATC operational improvements through study contracts and the systems engineering-2020 R&D contracts with US companies Metron Aviation and ITT.
But the AEA is not so up-beat about the interoperability situation and what it means for the equipment that will have to be installed. AEA members fear that they will have to buy one lot of on-board equipment for NextGen and another for Europe. “If SESAR and NextGen are not aligned it will further undermine their business case. This is a problem. SESAR and NextGen, as well as other regions, should align their deployment strategies and avoid different solutions for similar problems or airlines will withdraw their support.”