It is rare to find a book about air traffic control and “Reclaiming the skies” by John van Hoogstraten is a gem. John’s experience as an air traffic controller (ATCO), operations and safety manager, and consultant all over the globe gives him an interesting perspective. His current position as an independent consultant allows for a refreshing, free tone of speech.
The book starts with a razor-sharp analysis of how airlines imposed schedules on air traffic control (ATC) and how changes following the liberalisation phase pushed all actors into a race where each was focused on different achievements:
- Airlines for on-time performance
- Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) for capacity
- Airports for runway throughput
In this race, nobody is accountable for predictability and nobody owns the aircraft’s trajectory. Airlines define it, ANSPs manage it and airports receive it. And when demand surpasses capacity, ATCOs end-up managing the chaos tactically, at the last minute, instead of preventing it in the first place.
The book continues with an analysis of Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) and Air Traffic Flow Management (ATFM). It explores how those tools brought some progress at airport level for CDM and network level for ATFM, but concludes that they both missed their original objective of bringing stability, partly because of a failure to address the full trajectories of flights and partly because there is no global, neutral authority putting a system in place to create predictability by design.
This diagnosis of why ANSPs and ATCOs are almost constantly in firefighting mode and how technology keeps addressing the symptoms of chaos without touching its causes is brutally honest. John considers all facets of the status quo, including human factors and regulatory aspects.
The second part of the book focuses on solutions. According to “Reclaiming the skies”, what ATC needs is predictability, rather than last-minute actions to handle demand. The key to bringing predictability to ATC is to establish ownership of the trajectories – including the timing aspects. Airlines should own it and share all related information, from flight planning to execution, including readiness on the ground before departure. Similarly, ANSPs should own and share data about capacity, not in a static way but dynamically, constantly adjusted as a function of traffic, weather, staffing, and so on.
The book discusses the new concept of Integrated Capacity Management (ICM), in which airlines can adjust flight plans and negotiate adjustments with the network, therefore ensuring that demand remains adjusted with capacity at all levels. This requires supra-national authorities and the concept of Airspace Trusts is introduced. Such trusts would hold delegated authority to manage cross-border sectors, but the final jurisdiction would remain with each state. John also makes the case for bridging civil and military operations, allowing for improved flexible use of airspace.
Human factors, technology, regulatory, training and international considerations are core themes running through the book. This results in a well-rounded analysis of both the issues that aviation faces worldwide and of the proposed solutions.
You can order “Reclaiming the skies” from Amazon, as a Kindle ebook or a paperback with this link.
