Covid 19

For Alex Bristol, Chief Executive Officer at Skyguide, the COVID crisis presents Europe with an opportunity to re-make the continent’s air traffic management system along more flexible, cost-effective and efficient lines.

You have talked of entering a period of “the crisis after the crisis” – what is this exactly?

While traffic might be starting to recover, the recovery period will be long. And this means all of Europe’s carefully laid plans for air traffic management (ATM) funding and performance regulation simply don’t add up anymore. There are two key flaws with the performance scheme. The first one is that air navigation service providers’ (ANSPs) cost drivers are not connected to the revenue generation part of the business; per-tonne, per-kilometre, charging doesn’t pay for a busy terminal manoeuvring area (TMA) operation but it’s a great cash cow if all you have is overflights.

The second flaw is the incentivisation scheme. We have to incentivise investment that focuses on network performance – rather than individual ANSPs owning assets – and virtualisation. It will need to encourage investment in essential assets alongside the buying-in of services which can increase efficiency for everyone. We’ve got to incentivise outsourcing, where that makes more sense than buying your own equipment, as well as rationalise communication/navigation/surveillance (CNS) systems.

We are all trying to update our plans, but in all these new plans I still cannot see where the money will come from to create a sustainable system for the future and repay the losses we have incurred over the last two years. The risk is that Reporting Period Four (RP4) becomes another copy-paste of the previous ones.

There is a new dynamic emerging – the climate crisis. We are not quite sure exactly where that’s going to take us but collectively it means it is time we rethink the way that we organise and pay for air traffic management in Europe.

That means States taking responsibility for funding?

The question we are always been asked is: why can you not cut your costs by 50 % if traffic levels are 80 % down? The answer is because our variable costs account for around just 10 % of our business. With virtualisation we can probably raise that to 20 %, but it’s still not going to be the 50 % that an airline can manage.

There’s a fixed cost aspect to being part of the critical national infrastructure and it doesn’t diminish even when there’s nobody there to use it.

So who should be paying for that part? Maybe there’s a model that says if a State chooses to have an ANSP the fixed costs are a State responsibility, but service provision should be paid for by the user.

Only in times of absolute crisis and war do you really need to manage your own airspace – so let us design a system which works at a network level and then we’ll manage the exceptions for the 0.01% of times when they might occur on top of that.

What has Skyguide learnt from the crisis?

COVID has shown us the Virtual Centre is the right way to go and we’ve continued an absolute focus on the journey towards virtualisation. We’ve continued to implement further parts of our Virtual Centre, despite the economic and market turmoil, and I think that we can be proud of that. More and more ANSPs, partly as a result of COVID and partly as a function of time, have come to realise that Skyguide’s strategic direction is the one that they should also be following.

They are now realising that the virtualisation of ATM is not a theory: it’s happening today, in Switzerland. But it means changing technology, operations and culture.

By “culture” you include a changing role for the controller.

Yes, but the controller’s role has changed, in increments, hugely over the last 40 years and this will continue to be the case. The amount of immediate intervention required by a controller will decrease.

In 2017 we introduced the stripless system, which was the first tranche of the Virtual Centre. With that we created a fully electronic environment for the controller. Although it took a while to get used to it, they now really appreciate the human machine interface. We have managed to increase capacity very significantly and have seen a return on investment of between CHF 7 million and CHF 8 million a year against an investment of CHF 57 million. That’s huge for the ATM world.

Now we’re coming into tranche three – or “Virtual Centre touchdown”. This focuses on the controllers again, by focusing on operational benefits, through controller support tools, first use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and different underlying processes. By moving from an architecture based on two systems in two centres to a single Virtual Centre it will mean a controller can manage traffic in any of part of Swiss airspace, regardless of where he or she sits. It will also allow us to dynamically integrate civil and military systems and as we move from air traffic control to air traffic management we can start using data more proactively, to either to roster more efficiently or plan better.