Air Traffic Management

Over the recent couple of years, I started observing a certain reduction in the movement towards harmonisation and coordination at European level in our business.

The rationale, as I understand it, is as follows:

• Coordination and harmonisation as we knew it, i.e. through a neutral European agency – Eurocontrol, is too slow.
• Coordination and harmonisation as we knew it was not cost efficient – we have to pay a budget to maintain the agency, moreover the agency is taking work that could be done by our privatised / corporatised service providers and the cherry on the cake: it requires our ‘free’ input through consultation groups, reviews etc.
• If there would be a need of coordination and harmonisation, European legislators could decree, issue standards or rules and oversee that the free market adapts to fulfill the requirements. The legislator would then simply need a system [through another rule] to ensure the oversight.
• Since Europe is creating functional airspace blocks [FABs], a good deed of coordination and harmonisation will be done internally within the new structure. What remains will be dealt with through rule making and the market.

So European ATM actors, partly due to this rationale, reduced the commitment towards harmonisation and coordination at European level. In many areas, the effort by the ANSPs are going into the constitution of the FABs and to create coordination and harmonisation substructures within each FAB. We have CNS coordination, operational concept and implementation, human resources, safety management, and another number of coordination and harmonisation initiatives within each FAB in the becoming. The same people and companies say they had [have] no effort left for European wide coordination and harmonisation.

European ATM created a new layer of coordination. I think this is a good thing as the level of complexity of the system requires it. However, European ATM should not believe that this new layer replaces the old one: There will still be 9 FABs [once, inshalla, they come to be] and European coordination will still be needed.

Thus the creation of the Network Manager. In my eyes it is the answer to the need of coordination at European level for network capacity, efficiency, and environment. It is the hub for inter FAB, inter  airport and airport-FAB coordination, for coordinating the resolutions to crises that affect the whole network and for coordinating deployment of technology that becomes available through research and development that will be necessary to improve the service levels of the network. It will harmonise processes and procedures where coordination is necessary.

However, it is still not seeing the importance of coordinating human performance aspects that would affect the network performance. I think that in 2010 and also in 2020 and beyond, the human will remain the corner stone of the ATM system. Coordinating training processes and initiatives, for example,  especially in these times of change, is not only a necessity but would also make business sense as each FAB is undergoing similar changes. This however is not the case in the current way of thinking. Training and other human performance aspects are still seen as at the periphery and with marginal added-benefit if coordinated at a European scale. So in the mean time, each FAB is recreating the harmonisation and coordination processes that used to [and should continue to] exist at European level.

Although not going as far as in the case of human performance, I feel that safety, is following a similar path. After the efforts following the Uberlingen accident, we are back to believing that what is needed centrally is to oversee and regulate the  management and performance of each of the entities, and to continue, at somewhat a lower profile to coordinate safety initiatives and sharing of information. More could be done.

So to conclude, I think that coordination at European level is necessary. The fact that instead of 36 entities, only 9 will exist [when they will exist] just changes the number but not the requirement. Intra FAB coordination is an extra and necessery layer of coordination and harmonisation but does not substitute inter-FAB coordination. The Network Management is an answer to this new face of coordination and harmonisation and this is a very positive step at improving the network performance. However the Network manager and European decision makers in the field are still not seeing human performance as part of its scope. This is in my opinion a need as human performance a major contributor to network performance and also because intra-FAB initititives are simply recreating 9 ways of doing things in the field, which is an inefficient way of doing business.

I hope that human performance is included in the scope of the Network Manager in its role of coordinating and harmonising all the components that contribute to the network’s performance sooner rather than later
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