"The new Network Management system will be a fundamental enabler to improved trajectory management"

We have around 350 fewer flights to and from Russia each day and we have some restricted airspace areas such as the eastern parts of Poland and Hungary. Long-haul flights between Europe and the Far East are having to fly considerably longer; most of the airliners are not equipped to overfly the Himalayas – because of the weight of the extra components – so they have to fly more southerly or westerly routes. This adds between one-and-a-half hours and four hours to the flight, depending on destination and origin.

Traffic flows that have shifted slightly west or south have been well absorbed without any significant increase in delays.

There is another possible impact we are analysing. The rise in oil prices and a consequent rise in ticket prices, which for the moment has been counter balanced by a continuing strong demand for travel.

So in situations when traffic demand exceeds capacity we put in place measures that create small delays or small route extensions fairly spread across airspace users, but without major disruptions. In 2019 we put these measures in place after talking to ANSPs and airlines to manage this process. It was a titanic effort but everyone agreed to it resulting in a plan for the summer which enabled us to manage demand, still with some delays, but without a significant disruption in the network.

On top of this cooperative work with operations experts, I’m discussing with airline executives their active role in network planning since the only way to succeed as a European network is to have airlines participating in the planning process.

We will be able to ensure that the flight planned trajectory will be managed in an optimal way integrating, via advanced data processing capability, the trajectory with dynamic aeronautical data fully integrated with static data. This will allow us to optimise the business-to-business service, or business-to-customer as it will become. There will be a new way of interfacing in terms of an app-based human-machine-interface (HMI) approach.

We believe it is important to have trajectory and network information – including constraints of sectors, weather and so on – available for every qualified stakeholder to use.

The operational concept evolution will see more automation and artificial intelligence become available to manage air traffic.

To integrate all this will take time and all these technological developments need to be part of a single value chain of deployment.

That’s why we are closely coordinating with the SESAR3 programme and the SESAR Deployment Manager of which we are now part because it needs to be a single line of effort.

Key target is to significantly reduce aviation’s impact on the environment, especially carbon dioxide emissions. Simulations have shown that we can reduce the potential impact levels significantly over a disorganised system of air traffic management.

We have to manage business growth as efficiently as possible and in a way which is as environmentally responsible as possible.

In the next years traffic levels will grow significantly and we will need new iNM and ANSPs capabilities to be in place. If you don’t have both, and if you don’t have strong planning partnerships between airlines, ANSPs and airports, then the separation of the infrastructure from operations is such that it will not be manageable. And I don’t think we can afford that.

The good news is the level of cooperation between stakeholders is excellent. The challenge of COVID brought us closer together and now our airline customers see that ATM is not just a collateral issue but can really generate value.

The modernisation of iNM and the ANSPs is ongoing with a coordinated network approach and this makes me think very positively about the future of aviation.