Following Henning’s article about the fate of the original SESAR Concept of Operations (CONOPS), I received a slew of mails basically confirming his point of view and worries. Of particular concern seems to have been a document dealing with trajectory management…
People who had seen this document were of the opinion that it was little more than a reiteration of the legacy way of working with no visible attempt to bring things in line with the spirit, let alone the words, of the CONOPS.
Why am I not surprised?
During the definition phase we had a very hard time getting people to understand why the legacy system, based on managing airspace and massaging individual aircraft left and right had to give way to something else that took a broader view than is the event horizon of a controller working his or her sector.
The concept of trajectory based operations (one of the mainstays of NextGen also) does exactly that. The system is run on the basis of managing trajectories end to end with situational awareness shared by all concerned and hence both strategic and tactical decisions being aligned, safety permitting, with the business intentions of the owners of the trajectories. Airspace is shaped to allow the undistorted inclusion of the trajectories rather than trajectories being bent to fit the airspace.
It is obvious that in such an environment, very close cooperation is required between control units and between the FABs and this results in the need to give up a lot of the “my airspace my castle mentality” so prevalent in the past (and which seems to find a new lease of life in the latest FAB-based fragmentation of Europe).
We learned the hard way just how much resistance there is to changing the parochial mind-set of some people… for others, the whole idea of TBO appeared to be incomprehensible.
The CONOPS did in the end get published with TBO at its base… Of course we have seen that in the SESAR scheme of things a lot of the “fancy” stuff got kicked into whet they call Step 2… the 2020 time-frame. So, a book on trajectory management published in 2010 could not be expected to talk about anything but Step 1 stuff… basically legacy way of working, right?
Wrong! Patently wrong.
Trajectory based operations is not rocket science and in its simplest form it does not even need things like System Wide Information Management (SWIM) to be in place. ATC has more than enough data already to start the transition towards this more sophisticated way of working.
Except of course that the influences that would rather not have TBO and some other advanced features of the CONOPS become reality are still very much alive and hence even charting out a transition to the early introduction of TBO must have been a bridge too far.
This is a pity because the idea that “trajectory management” is central to SESAR has been generally accepted and is in fact the basis for most of the projects in SESAR.
But giving the projects the idea that “trajectory management” is not much different from what we are doing today will set them on the wrong track that will not lead to a better system. It will lead to an expensive flop.
One can only hope that the airspace users, reading that book, will also realize what is happening and will use their influence, however limited it may be these days, to pull things back to the straight and level, insisting that TBO is the way to go.
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