As some of us will remember, SESAR is not the first attempt to remedy the sad state of air traffic management in Europe. Think EATCHIP and ATM2000+… This latter was especially significant, since the ministers of transport of all ECAC States had signed off on it, promising to implement what was required to make the ATM2000+ concept of operations reality.
Very little, if anything, was realized of the lofty aims of ATM2000+. The best proof of this is that had ATM2000+ become reality, there would have been no need for SESAR… But why did those earlier projects fail? There was nothing wrong with the concept or the technologies proposed. However, everything was wrong with some of the major air navigation service providers in Europe who did everything in their power to block things from happening. In some cases they did this for no other reason than their inability to be ready on time and not wanting to be seen as lagging behind… When we were working on the initial phases of air/ground digital link and controller-pilot digital link communications, it was discovered that one of the biggest States in Europe did not have a digital-link policy, let alone a program to implement it. We practically had to “shame” them into starting work on this, arguing that it would look really bad if they were not involved…
Ministerial signatures notwithstanding, ATM2000+ sputtered, struggled and finally died when everyone started to wait for SESAR (the next big one…) to take over and solve all problems. In fact, what little may have come from ATM2000+ was also strangled because things were put on hold when the miracle watch began.
It is often said that SESAR is different. It is being created under the auspices of the Single European Sky (SES) legislation, it has the power of the European Commission behind it… it will be a success. Well, I am not so sure.
We have seen how SES I basically went South and SES II had to promise all manner of punishments to get states moving… sort of. So, SES is no magic bullet, it is more a hand-hold everyone is looking at, not unlike we did at the signatures of all those ministers which, in the end, proved to be of little value for ATM.
Some experts will tell you that SESAR is simply too big, like an overdeveloped dinosaur that cannot support its own weight… True enough, with some 300 hundred projects running (some say in circles…) it is not easy to see where things are going, optimistic communications from the SESAR Joint Undertaking notwithstanding.
This may be true but at the end of the day, it is a management problem, first and foremost. I do see a much bigger issue looming that will probably be SESAR’s worst nightmare when implementation starts. And in a way it will also mimic the problems faced by EATCHIP and ATM2000+, except on a much larger scale.
This issue is called Functional Airspace Blocks, or FAB.
FABs were first thought of by the European Commission when SESAR was not even a glimmer in air traffic management experts’ eyes and the idea was to force uncooperative States to work together on improving their ATM operations on the level of selected blocks of airspace that lent themselves to improvement… hence the word “functional” in the name of the damn things. A sane thinking ATM expert would have said that 3-4 FABs in Europe would be about what you needed… if one had to admit that Europe had failed to solve its ATM problems on the European level.
Guess what? By the time the music ended, nine FABs adorned the European landscape, each firmly built on political grounds with little consideration of what the best arrangement would have been from an ATM point of view.
ANSPs then retreated into their FABs to work out the legal and other institutional arrangements which took most of them a cool two years. In all that time little or no attention was paid to advancing ATM matters… The few concept of operations that were produced were little more than a restatement of things already being done. In any case, having a concept of operation for a FAB is a bit like having a separate CONOPS for the battery and for the engine in your car.
The concept of operations is supposed to be for air traffic management in Europe as a whole…
EUROCONTROL has been named the Network Manager but without any new powers to manage anything… They can develop ideas, make proposals but other than that, they are a toothless tiger. A nice title but it leaves one all important question wide open: who will coordinate between the FABs?
Make no mistake, States and ANSPs have not turned from wolves into sheep just because they are now part of one or the other of the FABs. Getting agreement on anything is as difficult and protracted a process as it has ever been. The only difference with the past is that once a decision is reached, it is not a European decision, it is a FAB decision… Getting a European decision means coordinating the FAB decisions and as we have seen, there is no provision to do that in an efficient manner.
It is scary how often we hear these days that this or that matter must be agreed on FAB level… in the past, this would have been European level.
Into this nice new world, reminiscent in its fragmentation to the 70s before the CFMU was built, arrives SESAR.
People in all kinds of high ANSP positions hasten to claim that SESAR had been built to be part of the FAB scene from the ground up. This is not true! I say again, this claim is FALSE!
When we created the SESAR Concept of Operations, some people did try to bring the FABs into the picture but this was flatly refused by the experts for one very simple reason. The idea of FABs may have looked attractive when seen from the failing ATM scenario of yesteryear but the same idea is totally outdated when looked at from a Trajectory Based Operations (TBO) perspective.
The FAB, as its name suggests, is an airspace based concept while TBO is a trajectory based one and trying to force TBO into the former results in a hybrid that inherits the worst characteristics of both concepts while having none of the good ones. I will not bore you with the details of TBO,if you are interested, you can read my other article here. Let it suffice to say that the FABs and the SESAR CONOPS are a very poor match. Only by practically raping the CONOPS can you make it fit with the FAB idea and that means a CONOPS that is less advanced than what we had before SESAR even started.
This is bad enough, but there is more. During the EATCHIP and ATM2000+ years, ATM decision making via the EUROCONTROL working structures was slow and difficult. In the FAB/SESAR scheme of things instead of one difficult process you actually have nine plus the inter-FAB aspect which is likely to be a dog of biblical proportions.
You cannot have nine different versions of how you manage a given trajectory… yet there is no assurance whatsoever that the nine FABs will interpret the world in the same way. The day someone will decide to introduce TBO in Europe in actual practice, they will suddenly realize that ATM fragmentation, the very thing EATCHIP, ATM2000+ and SESAR were supposed to eliminate from day one, is alive and well, kept in good health by nine fiefdoms even the EC has little power to control.
I do think that SESAR, assuming they will find the proper financing to get airlines to equip, has the potential to succeed. However, it will fail if the conceptual and organizational issues introduced by the presence of the nine FABs is not resolved at the earliest possible stage.
Claiming that SESAR was always meant to be FAB compliant will not be enough…
Steve,
Is there a lesson to be drawn from this continued dismal catalogue? Rather than lamenting the failure of States and their bureaucrats to act sensibly together (when did they last do that anyway?) maybe we should be thinking about solutions that keep them out of the equation altogether. During the SESAR defintion phase I confess I regarded the efforts of colleagues to promote aircraft self separation as impossibly pie in the sky. A few years, countless SESAR meetings, and subsequent underperformance later, I wonder whether they were right all along. Every motorist is familiar with the situation of arriving at the end of a traffic jam only to find that the cause is a well-meaning, arm waving, traffic cop. His motivation is avoidance of personal blame when something goes wrong, and he builds in margins accordingly; when individuals driven by self interest, and a slightly higher tolerance of risk, do the job, the result is usually smaller margins and less delay. I realise that the recent experience of the Western World’s bankers hardly supports the notion that market forces inevitably produce good solutions, but the parallel of traffic cops = ANSPs is irresistible.
Alex,
As you will remember, SESAR was supposed to bring paradigm changes to ATM and it is exactly those aspects of the CONOPS that are being pushed further and further into the future. Add to this the very real issue of the FAB’s and how these will work together in a TBO environment (they wont’t and they will blame TBO…) and one is almost tempted to say that the best course of action would be to ask for a bit of time-out and review the whole situation, taking into account the real (as opposed to the imagined or claimed) effects of the FABs. Once that has been understood, one could go back to the CONOPS and figure out where the divergences are… and close the gaps. It was of course perfectly understandable that the airsapce users wanted to have early benefits but what we had said back then is actually happening now that focusing on the early benefits leaves the paradigm changes out in the cold… and there is a very real danger that they will be left to linger forever… How we can solve this problem is a big question….
Steve,
I think it is a little unfair to put the User’s demand for early benefits (actually any benefit would be nice) up there with the protective herd instinct of the ANSPs as the reason for SESAR’s failure. With the costs approaching the bail-out of a small Euro zone country, the project is surely doomed anyway. A period of reflection (‘time-out’) during which some attention might be given to affordability and practicality would not go amiss. But I’m wondering should it even be relaunched with the same players.
Alex,
The demand for early ebenfits (which I stress was perfectly understandable) did give the ANSPs the perfect excuse to kick everything even remotely advanced to the background. Had the likes of LH kept up the pressure for the paradigm changing steps, we would at least not have had a situation where even the effort to change things has evaporated. I am not saying that the program would have been a success otherwise, but given up on the serious demands was a strategic mistake in my view. If ever things are reconsidered and a new start made, it should be very different…