The International Federation of Air Traffic Control Association (IFATCA) held its 64th General Assembly in Abu Dhabi and the program of the first day featured two panel discussions which included guests from outside of IFATCA.
This panel featured Elena Sorlini, managing director of Abu Dhabi Airports, Simon Hocquard, Director General of CANSO, Mohamed Al Farea, Regional Director of ICAO for the Middle East, Kamil Al Awadhi, Regional Vice President African and Middle East at IATA and Ahmed Al Jallaf, Assistant Director General at General Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA) of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Aviation requires all pieces to work together
The discussion started with the usual observation that air traffic is growing, especially in the Middle East, that Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) are understaffed, and that newcomers in low-level airspace and in space will lead to even more traffic. The topic rapidly shifted to the need for more collaboration as Kamil Al Awadhi recalled an example of work he did at an airline, optimising lots of details to reduce fuel consumption to a minimum on a specific test flight, only to see it end up holding for 20 minutes before landing at its destination airport. He stressed out that every cog in the aviation machine must work seamlessly if we want to achieve sustainability.
Simon Hocquard stressed that cooperation across ANSPs is critical and that ATM must transcend geopolitics. It makes little sense for one ANSP to optimise its airspace if its neighbors can’t absorb the extra capacity. Mohamel Al Farea summarised this in one sentence: “No countries left behind – No ANSP left behind”. Ahmed Al Jallaf added that all discussion platforms are important for more cooperation: IFATCA, but also Airports Council International (ACI), and ICAO, which all have regional branches and meetings, fostering international cooperation.
The panelists agreed that many solutions, like Free Route Airspace (FRA) or Trajectory Based Operations (TBO) work best only when applied at international level. Even if speaking to one’s neighbors is not always easy, cooperation is a must. This also implies putting in place more data sharing and not only between ANSPs but along the full aviation value chain, involving airlines, airports, and all other partners. As the IATA representative stressed: how can aviation in the UAE work so well across seven states and multiple ANSPs in a relatively small country? With good collaboration!
Wishful thinking or real progress?
Watching this panel left me with both a feeling of how slow aviation and ATM are in adopting change, but also how they are moving in the right direction. Saying “collaboration is key” might sound like wishful thinking but there is real progress taking place. It took 25 years to implement Advanced Collaborative Decision Making (A-CDM) at scale in Europe and the first free route airspace was created in Portugal in 2009.
Many parts of the world are still fragmented with many ANSPs working with different procedures and tools and they do so close to maximum capacity. Because the bottlenecks are on the inter-centre boundaries and at airports, collaboration is needed, both between neighboring ANSPs, and between ANSPs and airports. Such collaboration can only occur across regions and not within countries. The slow pace of change makes it difficult to see progress but there is progress.
