Piecing together progress

The UN agency that governs global aviation freely admits that the stakes at the once-in-a-decade summit that commences today are particularly high.

The International Civil Aviation Organization is expecting much from its 12th Air Navigation Conference at its Montreal headquarters with over 1,000 delegates —policy makers and regulators from 191 member states and the civil aviation industry— due to attend the event which runs until November 30.

The goal of the conference is to achieve consensus on new aviation standards block upgrades for interoperability, harmonization and modernization of international airspace.

But will it prove workable?

On paper at least, the development of a globally interoperable aviation system requires a uniquely collaborative and multidisciplinary approach, requiring all the relevant aviation stakeholders, including states, operators, air navigation service providers, manufacturers and airports to work in unified fashion.

Principle

The guiding principle of last year’s Global Air Navigation Industry Symposium (GANIS), through which ICAO laid much of the groundwork, was equally as clear: to provide the aviation community with the opportunity to identify points of common interest – and differences – before charting the next steps to achieve eventually a seamless and interoperable global air navigation system – one that will cost a huge USD 120 billion worldwide.

The challenge remains immutable: to manage the anticipated doubling of passenger traffic to some five billion by 2030, both the capacity and efficiency of that system must increase – all the time while safety performance is maintained.

The Aviation System Block Upgrade (ASBU) concept seeks to address that challenge. Proposed by ICAO, in essence, the ASBU model encapsulates a modular approach to ATM system modernisation, packaging the various system improvements into manageable ‘geo-agnostic’ blocks allowing equivalent capabilities to be supported throughout the world.

The ICAO framework thus acknowledges differences and provides flexibility in implementing the block upgrades depending on an individual state’s ‘need’ and ‘readiness’. Regardless of the form of block upgrade implementation, however, each state must establish upgrades that:

*  clearly define measurable operational improvements,

*  install ground and airborne equipment with operational and regulatory approvals,

*  have the standards and procedures for ground and airborne systems, and

*  have a positive business case.

As Norm Fujisaki, Metron Aviation’s chief strategy officer, notes, while there is flexibility in the way that ICAO will allow block upgrades to be made in each state, one critical thing to remember is that it will be the same aircraft and crew flying from one state to the next.

“So, the block upgrades can depend on a state’s specific need and a state’s readiness, but it shouldn’t require aircraft to carry different sets of equipment or crews to use different sets of procedures when flying from state to state,” he says.

“Some have said that the rest of the world could simply follow the lead of the US, Europe or Japan. But, those same people haven’t spent enough time outside the US, Europe and Japan to realize that things are different in other parts of the world. Traffic levels. Pre-existing infrastructure which can be a blessing and a curse. Power and broadband. Political, institutional and cultural differences. One size doesn’t fit all,” he says.

Eurocontrol director-general David McMillan, speaking last year, admitted that while support for the ASBU concept was partly motivated by local self interest, it also needed to take into account not just one’s own concerns but also those of other regions, particularly those who have very different issues to face.

“It makes sense to work to help ensure that the global decisions taken are right for our particular airspace. But I’d hope that it’s more than that,” he said.

“I firmly believe that while we need to work on the problems in our own regions – after all, the capacity constraints are becoming ever more pressing” MacMillan

He points to the example of the Asia Pacific region, where in 2006, the number of flights starting and ending in the region equalled European traffic levels.“The prediction for 2036 is that traffic there will be double that in either Europe or North America. Just from that one statistic you can tell that the challenges and problems facing that region are very different to ours.

“I firmly believe that while we need to work on the problems in our own regions – after all, the capacity constraints are becoming ever more pressing – we also need to pay more attention to the problems and the needs of the rest of the world as well.”

Fit For Purpose

Aviation is inherently one of the most globally interconnected sectors that there is. And making sure that air traffic management is fit for purpose on a global scale will benefit not only ATM, but the world economy as a whole.”

His FAA counterpart, Michael Huerta, concurs. Speaking at last year’s GANIS event, Huerta said the FAA’s move to finalize a historic collaborative agreement with Europe to ensure that its future systems – NextGen and SESAR – are fully harmonized was evidence of genuine collaborative enterprise on the part of the heavyweights.

“We have five working groups and more than two dozen specific harmonisation programmes to ensure that all the small pieces work together. This collaboration has begun in earnest and will continue until the job is done.”

He added that the FAA is also aligning the work it does on NextGen and SESAR with ICAO’s ASBU initiative. “The goal is to identify suites of technology and procedural changes that can be packaged in such a way as to be accessible worldwide for improvements in air traffic safety, efficiency and decreased environmental impact,” he said.

Huge Step

For CANSO, representing some of the world’s largest air navigation services providers, the ICAO ASBU framework represents a huge step forward. The former chief of the Civil Air Navigation Service Organization Graham Lake says it is a means to solve the less than joined up way of how improvements have been implemented to date:

He says that even in the US and Europe which have matured their modernisation programmes to the point of deployment, there remains a disconnect.

“NextGen is the FAA vision for the United States, the Single European Sky is the EU vision for European states. Meanwhile we are not even sure what Europe is! The members of the SESAR JU, the 27 EU states, perhaps the 39 state members of Eurocontrol, or the members of ECAC? Not everyone agrees that they are in or out! Then there is the rest of the world, CARATS the Vision and strategy for Japan, and there are more than 150 other countries in the ICAO family.”

He says that the ICAO ASBU framework is therefore a step forward, providing a vision and a set of modular targets for each and all these states to work towards.

“But what does this mean in practice? In its traditional role, ICAO defines what needs to be done, while CANSO and its members focus on ‘the how’. Delivering upgrades by state or FIR is certainly the way ICAO and its members normally operate. But for the aircraft operators, it is flights, whether by city pair, or mission, that is the usual modus operandi,” says Lake.

Interdependence

Lake says that what was clear at GANIS, and is clear from CANSO’s work on establishing the ASBU concept  is the fact that not only are the industry stakeholders so highly interdependent that partnering is a pre-requisite but also that funding is unlikely to emerge from anywhere other than the industry’s own resources.

Metron’s Fujisaki also plays down the ASBU’s ability to turn on an automatic funding stream. “ICAO says that if states do this, ‘a level of investment certainty for operators, infrastructure providers and equipment manufacturers’ will result. Sounds simple enough. Except, we haven’t been able to do this very well in the US and Europe,” he notes.

Fujisaki also reports that there has been some measure of angst around the manner in which the block upgrades have been developed so far: by a small, closed committee of technical experts circumventing traditional ICAO processes.

At the close of last year’s GANIS event, Fujisaki issued a plea to stakeholders not only to use a balanced approach that doesn’t over-emphasize the costlier ground-based portion of block upgrades but also not to focus too much on the block upgrades themselves and lose sight of the fundamental problems that need to be solved.

“Even before block upgrades were uttered, there had been insufficient attention given to defining and understanding operational problems. When we seek to more clearly define and truly understand the operational problems we face, we likely will find that there are creative ways of solving good portions of those problems quickly and inexpensively.”

Read More: On The Blocks

An edited version of this feature appeared in Issue 4, 2011. Subscribe to Air Traffic Management today. Details can be found at: Key Shop