SESAR shares its ambitions for air traffic management
A panel of airline, airport and aircraft manufacturer representatives joined Patrick Ky, Director of the SESAR Joint Undertaking, for a Forum discussion on the EADS stand on 17 June.
Manfred Mohr, Lufthansa’s SESAR representative, Airbus’ head of air traffic management Hugues Subra de Salafa and Thorsten Astheimer, Coordinator of the SESAR Europe Airport Consortium all described how SESAR would impact and benefit their sectors, and explained the benefits for the travelling public.
Patrick started out by explaining that air traffic management (ATM) is running at full stretch locally and nationally across Europe. The SESAR initiative aims to modernise ATM from a global European perspective by 2020.
“We have extremely ambitious goals, we want to triple air traffic capacity and make it ten times safer at half the cost and much greener too,” he added.
SESAR has a great deal to accomplish in very tight timescale, Patrick continued. Its aims cannot be reached without the buy-in of all the players in the industry, sharing existing best practice and developing global solutions that are implemented by all.
In support of this, Manfred said that all airlines want to grow, to improve flight efficiency with shorter routes and fewer emissions. Faster, better scheduling of flights would benefit passengers too, with cheaper ticket prices.
From an airport perspective, Thorsten added that bringing together ground control and ATM was very important: “airports are the nodes where traffic comes together and it is important to optimise the use of runways and improve the environmental noise and emissions aspects too”.
And for Airbus, Hugues stressed that safe aircraft movements and environmental efficiency were of paramount importance. “We have already started to develop SESAR capability for our current and future aircraft,” he said, adding that improved efficiency would help Airbus increase customers’ satisfaction with its aircraft.
