Mid-March Aviation Week published a double interview in which Canso director general Graham Lake and Air Traffic Control Association president/CEO Peter F. Dumont spoke their minds about air traffic management developments on both sides of the Atlantic.
The interviews were refreshing and revealing. They both spoke about the prospects of SESAR and NextGen frankly and eschewing the usual bluster and we-have-won type of text so frustrating in the “formal” communications.
Mr. Lake tells us that it is not yet clear where the 4 billion euros implementation funding needed by SESAR will come from… With SESAR well into its 8-year life-span and 2.1 billion euros being burned through as you read this, such an uncertainty about the future is cause for concern to say the least.
He also makes the point that the new ATM system will still need people to operate it. He then goes on to say that some 70 % of the typical ANSPs costs are staff related, expressing surprise that parts of the ATM network face disruptions as a result of labor disputes and demands for unsustainable labor agreements. As an industry, we cannot allow this to continue he states. There is a strong message here and one is almost tempted to compare the number of pilots and other airline stuff who lost their jobs because of the economic crisis with the number of ATC staff who had been handed the pink slip for the same reason…
Mr. Lake believes that an environment must be created that incentivizes solution-based behavior… but we are not there yet he warns.
Mr. Dumont in turn worries that there are as many understandings of what NextGen is or should be as there are people working on it. He quotes the story of a king who dispatched a bunch of blind men to study a new animal sort he had heard of called elephant. The blind men find an elephant and each of them touches a different part of the beast, creating their own mental image of the whole based on what they have felt. Returning to the king, each of them tells him what an elephant looks like… I will not bore you with the details, but you can imagine the confusion the king is left with while not being an inch nearer to understanding what an elephant really looks like.
Personally I was a bit hurt by reading NextGen being compared to an elephant and those working on it to blind men but the case the ATCA president makes is convincing… As he says, the men and women working in NextGen are not blind but some of them are hype focused, which, at the end of the day, boils down to almost the same thing. I may add, very quietly, that SESAR may too have its elephant…
He sees this problem as also affecting the ability of NextGen to be created with the required global interoperability built in from the ground up. It is high time he says for people to get together and hammer out a common understanding of NextGen as a system of systems rather than just a collection of functionalities… With a clear idea of this particular “elephant” the door will be open for the US to work together with the rest of the world more effectively. Again, a very clear message…
What is common in both interviews?
Well, one would expect such items as funding, human aspects and the elephant syndrome to be issues early on in a project, issues to be resolved before the go-ahead is given and certainly before billions are spent on what are effectively uncertain grounds. Neither of these people are given to needless pessimism and they are both interested in the success of SESAR and NextGen.
What they have done is raise a cautioning voice that managers and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic need to take very seriously. Optimistic communiqués are nice but they will not solve the problems…
