Cooperation, accelerating the deployment and the next steps of SESAR Deployment Manager
I had a chance to speak with Mariagrazia la Piscopia, the Executive Director at SESAR Deployment Manager (SDM), about cooperation in Air Traffic Management (ATM), speeding up the deployment, SDM priorities and more.
SDM is currently coordinating 356 projects with more than 100 partners – ANSPs, airlines, airports, MET services providers and other civil and military actors from the ATM ecosystem.
Since this discussion took place in Portugal, one of the success stories to mention, is being realised by NAV Portugal and ENAIRE, and aims at implementing free route airspace (FRA) cross-border and it is planned to be completed by the end of the year. The project is forecasted to bring €300 million of savings in the next 10 – 15 years.
Another big, cross-border, and multi-stakeholder project, this time at the airport level – Extended Airport Operations Plan and integration with the Network (EXOPAN) involves 20 airports and it is linked to another initiative – BEACON, that aims to implement the airport operation plan at 7 major European airports and their integration within the network. The project’s goal is to bring more efficiency at the airport level, more predictability, improved capacity, less fuel consumption and CO2 emissions.
If we look at the forecasted benefit of the entire Common Project 1 (CP1) we are talking about eight euros saved, for every one euro spent.
Cooperation and coordination – commonly used words in ATM
Cooperation is paramount among all the involved stakeholders, in SDM the cooperation among the different organisations has to be strong, to make things happen in a synchronised way. SDM is composed of ANSPs, airlines, airports, and the Network Manager which makes these stakeholder groups highly involved and committed by default. At the more operational and technical level, we have ATCOs, engineers, airport experts, pilots etc., this means that SDM has on board the people who truly know the business, this surely helps the ATM industry to deploy in a coordinated way.
The benefits of CP1 implementation are not just local, but also at the network level. Sometimes the local partners do not see the immediate local gain, because the benefit only appears when everybody involved implements the solution. This is why there is EU funding support in place, to support stakeholders implementing their modernisation projects even before they see tangible local benefits.
SDM has numerous small and big -sized industry partners in the alliance within its framework partnership. The industry players of all sizes are equally important as are their various perspectives that bring a lot of added value to the table.
Working towards accelerating the deployment
SDM has collected lessons learned from 10 years of implementation experience and indeed, it needs to keep putting efforts into accelerating the deployment and keep learning from the past experiences. It is crucial to have a strong commitment in deployment from the stakeholders’ side – starting from the research phase, all the way to deployment in order to ensure the needed benefits for EU aviation. Stakeholders need guidance and reassurance on which projects are the right ones for them to deploy in order to deliver local but also network benefits.
One of the main reasons for deployment delays is that, despite knowing that certain projects are the right ones to be implemented, there are parallel priorities. For example, a situation of sharp increases in air traffic combined with shortages of airport personnel and ATCOs puts an ANSP in a position in which a choice needs to be made, whether to implement a short-term local benefit, to allow the capacity needed, or to continue with an investment that will deliver benefits in the medium-to-long term.
Another key aspect of speeding up the deployment are incentives for the industry. There are different ways of doing this, and the continuation of EU funding is one of the most important ones.
SDM and its priorities
The priorities of SDM can be organised into 2 main streams. The first one is the finalisation of the short-term actions, on the technical side – finalising the implementation of CP1, in particular SWIM and FF-ICE (Flight & Flow Information for a Collaborative Environment) the new Flight Plan format enabling Trajectory Based Operations, initial trajectory sharing, and ground communication. This needs to go together with the operational side – the NM is developing the Network Operation Plan and the guidance for stakeholders on how to follow it.
The second stream is the mid- and long-term activities. The work must align to the direction defined in the ATM Master Plan. One of the important elements there is the Service Oriented Architecture (SoA). This is a new way to see the future of ATM – more digital and more cloud-based.
