Virtual Centre touchdown

Skyguide’s Virtual Centre programme has reached the “tranche three” or Virtual Centre touchdown stage of implementation. For Programme Director Laura Hopper this is more than just a technical move to a location-independent service, it involves a cultural shift which puts people at the heart of the change-management challenge. When complete, the benefits for airspace users in Switzerland – and potentially the rest of Europe – will be considerable.

Why does Skyguide need a Virtual Centre?

Skyguide operates out of two main centres, Geneva and Zurich. Each centre controls its own airspace and has its own IT systems and procedures. Controller licences are geographically constrained to each centre. This results in various cost inefficiencies and
impacts our customers in terms of traffic flow and above-average fees.

Our aim is to ‘virtualise’ the technical systems and rationalise Swiss airspace so that air traffic management can be location-independent, so any controller in Geneva or Zurich can manage any part of Swiss airspace. The supporting systems will no longer be monolithic and locked, but service orientated, open and resilient. Our aim is to work with the Swiss military to develop synergies and avoid duplications as much as possible and react dynamically to traffic demand while still ensuring national sovereignty.

The Virtual Centre aims to shift the 40 % gap in sector capacity to best-in-class, reduce the current rate of 30 % loss-in-productivity time through optimised scheduling, improve sector staffing and reduce non-controller staff costs to be more in line with our European partners. We will also reduce the number of avoidable flow management minutes of delay.

What are your major challenges to achieving these objectives?

The level of cultural and mindset change for Skyguide and the controller community is for me the most significant challenge. We need to take our people with us, not just during period of initial change but over the longer term to address human factor issues, such as managing the cognitive and system literacy differences between younger and more experienced controllers. To efficiently balance workload and optimise buffers, Skyguide needs to move away from geographical to competency-based licensing, improve capacity management through better data integration, analytics and system harmonisation and be able to split sectors into more individual flight levels to allow for greater flexibility in collapsing and opening sectors.

In the future, we manage the flow through a European ATM network and this flow is optimised not in the sector or the network node anymore but in the network itself. That means that the system understands that if you have a potential conflict around Heathrow, it can be resolved by slowing down a flight further out in the network, for example, over France or Italy.

To increase controller productivity, we need to safely automate many of the repetitive tasks that do not drive added value. For example, e-coordination between centres and neighbouring air navigation service providers (ANSPs), automating frequency
handover, clearance monitoring, adherence and conflict detection and multisector planning will break the threshold of two controllers managing one sector. Upgraded controller-pilot data link communication (CPDLC) will add capacity by replacing voice communications with data link. And we are developing an improved Human Machine Interface (HMI), with better decision support tools and artificial intelligence to help controllers with activities such as conflict resolution.

We also have to involve our regulators to ensure they are comfortable with the processes and technologies we are adopting. We’re going through an Agile process which entails regular defined releases – this is an intensive piece of work for the regulator to analyse and approve or, in some cases, recommend changes.

How could that work across Europe?

There would be huge benefits to move the Virtual Centre concept across borders. For instance, simulations show that by using this new approach we can double the number of elementary sectors in upper air space, which in turn will increase capacity and reduce the number of regulations we need to enforce.

What we are doing is fully in line with the Single European Sky (SES) vision and the work of the Single European Sky ATM Research (SESAR). But it will only work on a European scale if regulators understand they will need to become technically competent in areas such as Agile and can support the changes needed in areas such as ATCO licensing and machine learning if they are to fully support their ANSPs in making the change.