Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) are not the fastest at change and innovation, because of the heavy regulation and industry culture which always place safety first. The sheer number of employees can also play a role. It is easier to be innovative with smaller teams, and small companies also have shorter decision paths.
Like many industries, air traffic management (ATM) evolves and is undergoing a digital transformation. Not only do the changes happen but they happen at pace. It is easy to lose sight of it, but the rate of change is truly impressive. To name but a few, space-based surveillance has been a reality for a long time, remote towers are mainstream, virtual centres are starting to be implemented, uncrewed traffic management systems are a reality and artificial intelligence (AI) is entering the scene.
Last week I was invited to MC the 10th anniversary of m-click.aero, a small German company active in the digital transformation of NOTAMs. Besides the demonstration of the system in place at Berlin Brandenburg airport, presentations by Human Factors Consult, Zühlke, SysEleven and German ANSP Deutsche Flugsicherung were on the agenda. The presenters looked at the past, present and future, covering topics like statistics and analysis, NOTAMs’ digitalisation and cloud-based ATM systems.
When I asked m-click.aero CEO Matthias Pohl which lessons he draws from the last ten years, he mentioned how different organisations work at different speeds. Small companies can decide and act rapidly, which is not possible for their larger counterparts. Another hurdle in the relationships with larger organisations is that they employ experts specialised in various administrative and expertise matters, whereas in smaller companies, many functions are carried out by a single person. Matthias and his team successfully overcame those obstacles and m-click.aero has a long working relationship with DFS even if the first steps took more time than originally planned. m-click.aero products are well established and vital for DFS, both for statistics and analysis (airspace management, AIXM processing and charting), and for uncrewed traffic management.
Matthias also shared some insight about the future of m-click.aero. AI will play a role, especially large language models (LLMs). NOTAMs are extremely abbreviated and there are very few rules, making them hard to interpret without advanced algorithms. Rodney Leitner of Human Factors Consult gave the following example: “TWY S CLSD” and “TWY B CLSD S OF RWY 25”. The first means “taxiway S closed” and the second “taxiway B closed south of runway 25”. Depending on the context, the single letter S can mean “south of” or be a taxiway’s name. This is only one of many examples making the interpretation of NOTAMs complicated and m-click.aero continues to improve their solutions.
As with many technology companies, m-click.aero faces constantly increasing cybersecurity challenges. Instead of building expertise internally, Matthias decided to partner with SysEleven, which provides sovereign, open source-based cloud solutions in Germany. This way, m-click.aero can focus on its expertise and added value, and delegate infrastructure related tasks to external specialists.
My two personal takeaways from this anniversary are a source of hope for me. Firstly, aviation and air traffic management innovate. Maybe not as fast as other industries, but ANSPs and airports are on the way to digitalisation. One presentation by Zühlke about the company’s work in Zürich Airport and their vision for the future made it clear: all stakeholders can access a single platform, share data and enable AI to predict issues instead of reacting to them.
m-click.aero’s 10 years of experience show that there is a place for smaller companies and it is possible for them to work together with airports and ANSPs and bring a significant contribution to their digital transformation.
