If nothing else, the recent wholesale grounding of aviation in Europe will have been an eye opener even to the most recalcitrant and aircraft hating citizens and politicians of the old continent. Some people still tend to regard aviation as a toy of the rich and transport for holidaymakers which damages the environment and should be taxed heavily. Well, with nothing flying for a few days everyone had to realize that aviation is an essential and integral element of our daily life and this is true also for those who never set foot on an aircraft. Car parts, produce and millions of other items normally carried by air were left undelivered with no alternative means of carriage.
This was a timely reminder not least because the SESAR Joint Undertaking is seriously looking into how public funds may be made available to support the deployment of the new SESAR technologies.
The total cost of SESAR is put at around 35 billion Euros of which 20 billion is to be spent by the airspace users to equip with the new capabilities. And herein lies the catch!
In past programs of far smaller magnitude, airspace users were usually required, or even mandated, to invest up front often supported by little more than shaky business cases and strong promises of benefits. In a disturbingly high number of cases the actual benefits, if they came at all, were far lower than advertised. Mode S Enhanced Surveillance is the most recent painful example of this.
Airlines, by the very nature of their operation, do not normally sit on a pile of cash and from their perspective, bolting anything on the aircraft that does not recover the investment within about two years is a bad idea. Very few new elements of air traffic management are able to meet that requirement.
In the past, giving aviation a boost in the form of public funds to speed up ATM related investments was anathema, not least because of the love/hate relationship people and some politicians seem to have had with flying.
I am sure you too have experienced sitting in a traffic jam and seeing all those other stationary cars around you belching CO2 and root into the air while remembering how the extra two lanes long planned but never built because of resistance from certain quarters would have eliminated the problem long ago.
Something similar was happening to aviation too. Had there been possibilities to finance equipage up front from public funds to keep projects going until the benefits started to accrue, we would have a very different aviation scene to-day.
As it is, the 20 billion euro investment expected from the airspace users is in fact also the most often quoted potential showstopper from the airspace user perspective. After all, you do not ask truckers to finance building a new motorway, that is done using public funds. It is when people start using it (i.e. they start enjoying the benefits) that they are asked to pay for the privilege. Why should air traffic management be any different, certainly when the investment is of this magnitude?
SESAR is breaking new ground in this respect as they are actually working on finding such a funding solution. Obviously, the first step is to create credible business cases that can convince the airspace users that investing in new technology is worthwhile as the benefits will be greater than the investment. But even if this step is successful, there remains the issue of time until the benefits can be realistically expected. And this is where public funds could make all the difference.
If a mechanism can be found to take the industry from equipage to full scale benefits using funds not previously tapped into, deployment of SESAR should be a far smoother affair than can otherwise be expected.
Securing those funds will not be easy. But it is essential.