Welcome to a new series from the Global Airspace Radar team bringing you coverage from Airspace World 2026. The entire team had many meetings across the four days in Lisbon and will prepare stories over the coming few weeks highlighting discussions and new learnings.
Below are some highlights from four of my discussions during the days in Lisbon highlighting new opportunities for airspace management and advanced air mobility (AAM).
Thales AIR Lab
Jean-Philippe Mota, Operations Director, AIR Lab walked me through the concept and shared live insights into the tool at work. Launched in Singapore and co-funded by Thales and CAAS, AIR Lab was developed to address a challenge that today’s ANSPs have – no shared environment to collaborate, experiment and explore potential traffic evolution at a regional scale. They only see their own data and don’t have an easy way to collaborate with other organisations.
The traffic in Singapore is expected to grow by 60% in the next ten years, there are 49 FIRs in the Asia-Pacific region and 43 countries. This is a wide-ranging, growing and complex airspace.
The cloud-based software brings together stakeholders across the ATM value chain including ATCOs, AI experts, software engineers and local start-ups to create a virtual ‘sandbox’ to experiment and co-create the future ATM technologies. Basically this is an ATM digital twin. There are four segments supported within the functionality:
- Observe – Real-time air situation display with data provided by EUROCONTROL, CAAS and the FAA.
- Understand – Review what is normal traffic and identify hotspots that could impact normal air traffic flow
- Simulate – Using historical data, training and future planning can be conducted with the support of an AI ATCO
- Collaborate – ANSPs and airlines can work together to conduct live simulated exercises.
As AI was such a key topic for this year’s event, let me share an example of how the tool uses AI. It can generate flight plans based on historical data (Machine Learning), resolve conflicts and avoid constraints (a constraint would be something like a volcano erupting or a storm) using an AI ‘reward system’ (the AI model learns optimal strategies through repeated play). Consider this a gamification component in the training of the AI model.
The current use case being developed is related to FF-ICE: Flight and Flow Information for a Collaborative Environment. Looking outside of the region they are working with ICAO to expand live trials. Any ANSP can request to join if they are interested in learning more.
AAM comes in to play
Two of my conversations looked at the movement of Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) toward deployment.
First, speaking with Andrew Carter, CEO and Co-founder, ResilienX about their recently launched AAM OPTIX digital infrastructure for AAM ecosystems. In reality the goal is to develop an AAM Operations Centers based on this capability. Building on other ResilienX solutions the platform uses a secure data exchange (SDX) that allows integration of data from any sensor or system, normalises it into a common format and distributes it to any downstream consumer of the data.
What’s interesting here other than the AAM focus is the way the solution embraces an open, vendor neutral interface that will make it easy to add new sensors, users and platforms. Downstream users will automatically receive their required data in a usable format. I’m looking forward to seeing a demo, we only were able to have a discussion. As ResilienX is located in the US, it could be that AAM flights come to fruition sooner than other regions due to the eight eIPP (eVTOL and AAM Integration Pilot Program) projects.
The second conversation was with Amit Ganjoo, Founder and CEO, ANRA Technologies who is also building on their UAS experience and to provide an offer in the AAM space. In this case the offer is a little different. Their solution will support airspace or air traffic management within the realm of AAM as a provider of services. Building on their existing UTM platform they are adding functionality for AAM and vertiport operators.
Amit stated “the current state of AAM is similar to where drones were 4-5 years ago.” ANRA is participating in 3 of the eIPP projects mentioned above and will have the opportunity to already begin validation of a CONOPS for AAM using digital twin technology.
Both organisations have been involved with NASA on these projects.
A few words on Remote Towers
The last conversation to highlight in this article is related to another topic, remote towers. Kyle Snyder, Aviation Business Development Director, Kongsberg explained that remote/digital towers are currently deployed with Avinor and NAV CANADA. The latter has commissioned 70 such towers to be deployed over the next 24 years. The concept of these remote towers is to create a hub that manages them and not have controllers assigned one-to-one with a specific tower. Avinor already has a single controller location managing multiple airports.
Looking toward the US, they have yet to begin the service design assurance (SDA) process with the FAA which is required before this technology can be deployed in this region. Once the SDA process is completed their target would be airports who are currently un-towered and desire a tower. An additional benefit is to prepare them for AAM in the future. So you would get AAM-ready locations.
These are just a few highlights of many to come from the Global Airspace Radar team. Stay tuned as there’s a lot of material to cover so it will take quite a few articles to do everything justice. Look out for the ‘Airspace World in focus’ tag on these stories.
