Should we listen to the jungle telegraph?

 Editor’s note: When the material for this article hit my desk, I thought long and hard, pondering what to do with it. Most of what is said in it I have heard also myself and Cleo, the original author is well connected and not given to crying wolf… Having consulted a number of friends, I decided to go ahead and publish it, duly qualifying some of the information as bits off the jungle telegraph. As you know, there is a lot of noise coming off that particular type of telegraph but if you listen carefully, you can learn surprising things. Some of which might even be true.
No ATM person having suffered through EATCHIP and ATM2000+ could wish anything but for SESAR to succeed. There is no plan B and if the European Commission, not to mention the airlines, sees all this money being squandered, there will be hell to pay. Literally…
When you ask people close to the program about how things are going, you will either get a blank stare or a few mumbled words about SESAR being reoriented, project dates slipping, some technical projects having run ahead without the non-technical underpinning having been delivered to them and the need to stop several projects for anything up to a year to get things back on track again. There are strange noises also about a SESAR 2. Mind you, this is on the jungle telegraph and the messages are unsigned.
With just one or two people saying such things one may think it is the normal noise in a complex project. When you have scores of them, it is hard not to take notice. Of course in a project involving so many people and so many organizations, there are bound to be those who always complain. Yet, somehow you get the feeling that there is more to this than meets the eye…

During the SESAR definition phase, delivery deadlines were so sacrosanct that most of the technical work packages were pushed through the system without there having been an agreed concept of operations. The result was predictable and it casts a shadow on the whole project to this day. Ignoring the interrelationship between the technical and non-technical levels once again, as rumors seem to indicate, is a prescription for disaster. If some projects on which others must build lag behind, you must stop the others and wait for the former to catch up. Logical… except that organizations who had allocated zillions of people to work on SESAR will not get paid while the projects are idling. So stopping is no option. They must carry on churning out something… just like in the definition phase. With the same results.
EATCHIP and ATM2000+ have also been reoriented a few times during their lifetime, each exercise bringing them closer to the scrap heap from which SESAR has risen. Now SESAR is being reoriented… you get the picture? Of course this may be based on a misunderstanding and a reorientation may in fact even be a good thing. This is typically a case where we must givo those folks the benefit of the doubt.
And now SESAR 2. Admittedly, if you want to continue a project like this in Europe, you better start early. By the time all the agreements and the financing is in place, a whole generation of ATM experts reaches retirement age. But bringing in the idea of phasing (remember EATCHIP 1 and 2 and 3 and so on…) can be, and was, abused to actually create an excuse for not achieving things in the current phase. No problem, we will do it in the next phase… it was too early, too immature and so on. Here again we are faced with something that seems to be the talk of the town on the SESAR shop floor while on the management level there seems to be ignorance of the subject. Something to check out and follow up for our readers in a future article.
Mind you, all this is happening against the backdrop of the Functional Airspace Blocks (FAB), an idea that should have been realized back in the time of ATM2000+ and which should be on its way out to be replaced by the truly seamless European solution SESAR originally represented.
I say originally because at ATC Global in Amsterdam the boss of French ANSP DSNA had the audacity of saying that SESAR was built on the idea of FABs right from the start. This is totally incorrect. Why are they so keen on claiming this then? Simple. SESAR as originally defined is a threat to the FAB castles and hence must be subjugated into and under the FAB concept or else the new kingdoms will find themselves obliged to align with the real European solution…
Does all this sound awfully familiar? Well, it should. Previous attempts to reform European ATM had taken off, faltered and then crashed in flames. Not because of EUROCONTROL’s incompetence or the airlines’ reluctance to invest, as is so often (incorrectly) said.
The reasons were parochial interests, the lack of proper European leadership and the lack of powers to make things happen. The exact same things SESAR is also missing. The Single European Sky legislation, implementing rules and what have you should in principle increase the chances of success and the SJU has shown that flexing its muscles can produce results. Let’s hope they train those muscles further, they will be needed… parochial interests are far from dead yet!
Take this report with a grain of salt, it is just stuff off the jungle telegraph…