Airspace World’s official conference will be underway in a short time, although for some attendees the CANSO Leadership Summit kicked things off on Monday. This year’s event theme “From Vision to Delivery – Skies in Transition,” considered the vision and reality of global deployments and a focus on regional activities. Simon Hocquard, CANSO President and CEO, kicked things off by setting the stage for a system under pressure due to airspace closures, increased workload, GNSS interference and the rise of space activity. A few interesting statistics in his opening brought these topics to bear – AZANS experiencing an increase of 10,000 flights in two days, HungaroControl experiencing a 30% increase in overflights and a 12% increase in space launches globally since last year.
These are only a few examples of stressors to our infrastructure. Simon said: “Systems do not transform themselves, people lead that transformation. As leaders in this room, your role is not just to respond to change, but to shape how your organisations navigate it. Creating clarity in complexity, proactively driving collaboration, investing in people, embracing agility, and thinking beyond traditional boundaries.”
The increase in space launches was a great entrée to the event’s keynote address, Kiko Dontchev, Vice President of Launch at SpaceX. Most people think of rockets when you think of SpaceX although their stated mission is to ‘make life inter-planetary.’ More specifically, they are not a rocket company, they are an infrastructure company. And they need rockets to build this future vision. We all learned more about the linkage between SpaceX and STARLINK and the company’s innovation algorithm. Some great lessons for those bringing new ideas to market. Space launches are expect to grow from around 200 per year the moment to over 3,000 in the next 10 years!
As seen below, STARLINK can bring connectivity almost anywhere – picture for attention…
Two panels followed the keynote with the regional panel highlighting some of the challenges and successes across global CANSO regions. Technology – SOA and TBO, collaboration between ANSPs, airlines and airports, the importance of civil-military integration/coordination in today’s geo-political climate and more. The themes brought forward closely align with the themes of this week’s event. Not surprising and good to see alignment.
I have give a ‘shout out’ to DECEA, who’s ATCO staffing is made up of 52% women. It’s interesting to see how women are drawn to this career opportunity in this region and maybe there are learnings that could help other regions balance the ATCO workforce better.
I won’t go through all of the interesting stats included in these presentations now, this story is only to highlight the direction we’re going this week, but I’m sure they’ll find their way into my ongoing Airspace World coverage.
