Weekly review #37 – 21st of February 2020

Air Traffic Control is not the most innovative industry ever. For good reasons, amongst which safety and regulations, innovation in ATC tends to be slow. Is this changing? Is this an effect of the "regulation period" based funding? Or is it because newcomers like drone operators are pushing and have a different pace? Even a pure ATC technology like remote towers feel like they have been in preparation for years if not decades.

It seems that innovation is coming to ATC more than ever before and faster too. Do you feel the same? Do you think this is a good thing?

ANSP news

• Avinor results for 2019 are stable - Quoting the report: "The fall in traffic income (charges) was partly offset by an increase in sales and rental income in the fourth quarter."
• BULATSA is looking for new air traffic control trainees - The Bulgarian ANSP starts a recruitment campaign this spring. Age limit is 30 and English proficiency at B2 level is required.
• DFS to start new GPS approaches in Hamburg - The new procedures will be tested before becoming operational, at both Hamburg Fuhlsbüttel and Finkenwerder airports.
• Industrial actions to affect ATC in Italy on the 25th of February 2020 - Several sites of the Italian ANSP ENAV will be affected by strikes on this day.
• Remote digital towers coming to six airports in Belgium - The Board of directors of skeyes has decided yesterday to launch the tender procedure for the phased setting up of digital control towers at the six Belgian airports.
• 16 flights land on a closed runway at Amsterdam Schiphol - As one runway got blocked due to an aircraft with a technical failure, LVNL ATCOs redirected 16 flights to another runway. It became clear later that this had not been released for operation. All aircraft landed safely. LVNL requested that some audio recordings get removed, causing a dispute with a broadcaster.

Market news

• Snowflake joins Cirium - Snowflake, an innovator in fusing and streaming live flight and navigational data, has signed an agreement to become part of Cirium, the expanding aviation analytics group.

Reports and data

• EUROCONTROL Network Operations Report for January 2020

Research and innovation

• New techniques to increase runway capacity - The static pairwise separation for departure concept is intended to help increase the number of aircraft taking off, while the staggered threshold concept focuses on planes that are landing. Frederic Rooseleer at EUROCONTROL explains how it all works.
• Xavier Pretat on remote tower - Review of remote towers history, present and future including economical but also human factors, plus a good overview of deployed projects by Xavier Pretat
• Indra remote tower - Read details about the Indra remote tower solution, including use of artificial intelligence. This is the solution that is used by avinor and Kongsberg at Bodo.
• CANSO Smart Digital Tower Task Force, supported by Think Research - The aim is to produce a user-focused document intended to introduce the Digital Tower concept and discuss the key aspects to consider within a Digital Tower programme.
• Post by SESAR young scientist of the year 2019 - In December 2019, Junzi Sun was awarded the SESAR Young Scientist Award for his research on open aircraft performance modelling. In this article, he describes his academic trajectory to date and highlights the areas of ATM where young researchers should be channeling their curious and critical minds in the coming years.

UAV and UTM

• Talking UTM with Amit Ganjoo - Ganjoo has been involved in UTM development since 2015, and his company has participated in every NASA and FAA discussion since then. ANRA was recently awarded a contract to assist the nation of India with UTM integration.
• Still no findings in the case of drone sightings leading to traffic stop in Madrid - As for in the Gatwick case, the police still has no proof or arrests in this case. This article details the geo-fencing mechanisms but these can also certainly be deactivated.
• Drone Alliance Europe releases U-Space Whitepaper - DAE’s U-space Whitepaper 2.0 explains that a “federated model encourages multiple providers to enter the market and in doing so enhances safety and efficiency while driving down cost to the end users.”

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