As European aviation is on the brink of a challenging summer season, SITA was implementing critical infrastructure upgrades and weather intelligence solutions to contribute to higher network capacity.
Global Airspace Radar had the opportunity to discuss with SITA for Aircraft, CEO, Yann Cabaret, their technology developments. The company’s approach focussed both datalink communication modernisation and weather data integration challenges, in view of growing traffic numbers and the industry’s continued push for a smoother summer for aircraft movements.
Frequency is key – Datalink network upgrades for 2025
SITA has been implementing a major upgrade to its digital communications network across Europe, India, and Latin America. The initiative expands ground station infrastructure, introduces new digital systems to reduce reliance on voice communication, and adds frequency options to improve service reliability. The upgrade represents a significant enhancement to the world’s largest aircraft communications network, supporting more than 2,500 radio stations that handle half of the world’s aircraft communication traffic. With recent additions including Norway’s Avinor and Serbia-Montenegro’s SMATSA, around 90 ANSPs globally now use SITA’s ATC Datalink Service, with over 25 European ANSPs deploying the company’s ATN/VDLm2 solution.
Yann Cabaret outlines: “In Europe we do work together with both our ANSP customers and EUROCONTROL, resulting in a substantial re-investment in our network VHF network”, to further emphasis: “This collaboration is the cornerstone for supporting peak summer air traffic.” He is acknowledging the past challenges while emphasising current progress: “We had a difficult summer 2024, we had outages. We worked successfully for 2025 to increase redundancy, to increase overall capacity of the network to support expanding digital air traffic control operations.”
Central to this effort is addressing frequency scarcity, a fundamental bottleneck in aviation communications, with on-going efforts to increase availability and optimise usage.
“It is new this year what we deploy. It is new in terms of new frequencies, more VHF frequencies have been allocated in different parts of the world, and a different way to manage air traffic.” The company has developed improved methods for steering aircraft between frequencies. It is often forgotten that frequency is a scarce resource: “We allocate more for ATM now. This does not sound so exciting but it is powerful.”
Weather data integration – an old but new challenge
One of the most pressing operational challenges involves ensuring weather data consistency across different stakeholders. Yann Cabaret explains this challenge: “Today we are very good at making sure that pilots and dispatchers have the same data, in real time, so they know what each asks for. But the air traffic controller is running his operation out of a different data theme.” The fundamental question becomes: “How do we make sure that we provide to the air traffic controllers the same data that the pilots and the dispatchers see?”
SITA’s approach involves extending its ISTA eWAS weather application, traditionally used by pilots and dispatchers, to ANSPs for controller use. However, implementation faces multiple technical and regulatory hurdles due to the traditionally monolithic nature of existing ATM systems and national regulations. ANSPs are typically required to receive weather data from national providers where the contractual counterpart is generally not the ANSP itself.
In collaboration with France’s Direction des Services de la Navigation Aérienne (DSNA), SITA is working to address these data consistency challenges through pioneering weather intelligence mapping initiatives designed to improve ATC decision making.
The urgency of this challenge is underscored by escalating weather-related impacts across European airspace. Adverse weather has become the second main cause of delay with 43% of all disruptions in 2024 in European airspace, after capacity and staffing, according to EUROCONTROL. Summer 2023 delays jumped 59% compared to summer 2022, followed by summer 2024 delays climbing 41% versus summer 2023. Between April and October 2024, more than one day in three reported deteriorated meteorological conditions, creating cascading operational challenges including unexpected deviations, sector overloads, and high complexity in high traffic areas.
Collaborative approach drives industry progress
Yann Cabaret emphasises the shift from traditionally adversarial relationships to genuine collaborative partnerships. “Everybody talks about collaboration – this is a bit of a bingo word, but this time I see it working. We all have a common interest, and this is to provide more capacity,” the CEO noted. This collaborative approach extends beyond rhetoric, seeing concrete results in datalink deployment: “Great cooperation with EUROCONTROL and the ANSPs here,” he highlights, pointing out the successful coordination on frequency allocation and network enhancement efforts.
With Norway’s inclusion through the Avinor partnership scheduled for early 2025, SITA can now provide complete airspace coverage across the European Union and adjacent countries as part of the Single European Sky.
Industry technology trends
Discussing the technology trends in air traffic management versus other industries, Yann Cabaret shares his observation: “What is strangely missing is the adoption of AI technology that is being adopted across other industries. I don´t see so much AI in ATM. Is thatgood or bad? At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona 2025 there was no booth without AI applications – AI was everywhere. And yet in ATM it is not really there. Maybe we do not go into buzz words, but it is strangely not so present yet.”
Checking on the SITA applications for AI in air traffic management, Yann Cabaret confirmed the trend, as SITA implements machine learning for fuel optimisation, not AI yet.
This stance suggests the aviation industry’s preference for incremental, validated technological advancement over experimental implementations during critical operational periods.
Measuring success – Checking back after the summer
My take-aways: SITA’s initiatives reflect responses to key operational challenges that have constrained European aviation capacity during recent summer peaks. The combination of datalink modernisation, weather intelligence solutions, and collaborative frameworks are the foundations for sustained capacity growth. While in theory this is obvious for all partners, its execution remains a continuous challenge.
Tackling weather with data sharing and new partnerships will be the next big thing with impact on performance, given the increase of adverse weather constraints and incidents. In Europe and globally.
The implementation and upgrade of datalink systems is a long-lasting issue, for almost decades. All operational stakeholders, the regulators and the policy level jointly went through a painful learning curve. Hopefully, these enhancements, ranging from new frequency allocations to better equipment and improved interoperability, have the potential to support meaningful gains in flight efficiency. As the industry is in the midst of summer traffic right now, the SITA infrastructure investments are tested against the operational realities of peak demand.
Yann Cabaret expresses optimism about the collaborative framework: “There are two choices, either we blame each other – what is usually what happens – or we are proud of what we have achieved together. At least this is the approach before the summer – hopefully we all say the same after the summer.”
As all stakeholders, Global Airspace Radar crosses our fingers for a smooth summer and a minimum of delays in the system. The jury will be out until the fall timeframe. In any case, I fully trust that the technical contributions of SITA will bring measurable benefits to the system compared to 2024.
