Are ATM operational concepts the cause of failure?

I have known Jean-Marc Garot, the former director of EUROCONTROL’s Experimental Centre in Paris for a long time. A forward thinker and in many ways a visionary, he retired from EUROCONTROL in 2005. He has now published an interesting article in The Controller magazine with the title “What is an ATM concept?”
I think everyone in Europe and in the US who has ever been involved in the development of operational concepts for air traffic management should read this article. Not because it is so good or so full of revelations from which we can learn but to see just how poorly we have communicated our efforts and how completely things have been misunderstood on various levels of the ATM world and at different ATM organizations.
The article starts off with a nice and even funny summing up of how, it is claimed, experts for concept work are/have been selected. There is indeed some truth in the description and it is also true that there have always been people on the concept groups coming from airlines, ANSPs, industry and what have you who could only think in terms of their own particular activities with little regard for anybody else’s. But those were always a minority. Troublesome yes, but hardly determinant for the final product.
The overwhelming majority of experts in concept work knew what they were about and it was quite common to have airline reps with an ATC background as well as the other way round with ATC folks who were flying on the side.
The article correctly points out that some of the documents produced were indeed overly voluminous… It is a pity that in the very next paragraph 4D Trajectory Management, System Wide Information Management (SWIM) and even air/ground digital link are listed as mere hypotheses, ambiguous descriptions that everyone can agree to and which therefore assume the status of certainties, no longer questioned and on which benefit expectations can be built… without much justification.

Validation and simulations get their share of putting-down, they become no more than misguided efforts by inept experts at showing that things can work in an artificial environment and hence will also work in real life…
When things implemented in real life fail to deliver, the failure is attributed to conservative controllers, claims the article, and the development work can start all over again.
The article highlights that in the 60s and 70s a number of very successful projects, like flight data processing and radar data processing, have materialized but little else got done since.
NextGen and SESAR also get their share of the writer’s wrath. NextGen and SESAR are not concepts, they are plans… and are reduced to little more than just a description of steps to be taken one after the other. The worry often echoed by the airlines that a lot of money will have to be paid up front for uncertain benefits way down the line is also mentioned in the article.
Towards the end, there is a paragraph that expresses regret about the passing of the times without concepts and road maps. A time “…where engineers were testing new functions with actual data and in shadow mode. Where a trustworthy relationship existed with open-minded air traffic controllers ready to embark on tests and trials in real operational environments. Which took advantage of human-centered systems which is the essence of ATC and which relied on common sense, rather than on ESARR 6 or some other sophisticated regulation.”
Indeed… those were the times of simple aircraft managing simple trips in a much simpler world in which oil and financial crises were all but unknown and to-day’s safety levels just a dream to be realized.

I am sure many air traffic controllers liked this article (especially the human-centered bit) but many more will have started thinking. The article makes many statements that are correct but it leaves even more statements, that are also correct, unsaid. If you are even a little bit at home in this business, you will feel the presence of the gaping hole left by those unsaid things.
This is why the article is misleading and puts most of the blame where it does not belong.
First and foremost lets just say that air/ground digital link, SWIM and 4D trajectory management are not ill-defined concepts that still have to show their benefits. Elements of SWIM are used in CDM information sharing and by the CFMU in their client applications, most of the busy airports of the world would be paralyzed if they did not have digital link services and 4D trajectory management is something the airlines have practiced for ages and its application in the ATM concept is no longer rocket science.
It is true that several ATM concept have been developed and put on the table over the years. It is also true that very few of those have advanced to daily operational use. But the reason for the failures was neither the conservatism of air traffic controllers nor the fact that they started life as concepts rather than concrete solutions.
JM mentions the successes of the 60s and 70s and mentions how little has been achieved afterwards. Regrettably, he fails to identify why this was so.
Things went relatively smoothly while implementation projects were mainly local to a given country. Putting new FDP and RDP systems into your own control centers was easy. That most of those systems could not communicate with systems in neighboring centers was apparently not worrying anyone. We know today what a mistake this was and the adverse effects are still with us. Had there been a concept or rule about interoperability back then…
Things started to unravel when it was no longer possible for even the largest states to simply ignore what was going on around them and further development had to be based on regional requirements and solutions. There had to be a concept to drive things and to bring everyone to a common understanding of what needed to be done. But even with an agreed concept on the table, people had a hard time agreeing on the practicalities of the next steps.
There was nothing wrong with the concept. It were variously the States and the airspace users who, in the end, usually blocked its implementation for a variety of reasons, some valid, some ridiculous. But the end result was the same: the ATM system was stuck in a permanent state of just being ahead of a complete overhaul. With the passage of time, the concept needed updating of course, not because the original was lacking but because of inaction, the world moved on around the obfuscating ATM community and things had to be refreshed on the concept level.
It is telling to realize that some of the most advanced features being proposed by SESAR have in fact been described in part in concept documents produced by EUROCONTROL more than 20 years ago!

The solution to to-days’ problem is not to re-visit the “red-tape process of concept” as the article suggests. It is the development of a system that meets the requirements deduced from the concept and in implementing it on a regional basis, leaving political and parochial considerations out of the picture.
Air traffic management is a service being paid for by customers and being provided by specialized agencies who exist simply because there is a market for their product. As the customers develop, so must the product and also its providers.
Earlier times may appear attractive in their conceptless simplicity but ATM evolution is towards the future where trying to work without a concept is like trying to fly without air.
At the end of the day, both are invisible but nevertheless remain absolutely essential.
You can download the article here.
Why not subscribe to The Controller? Click here!