LFV has been a pioneer in Europe for the Remote Tower services introduction. What is the result of this revolution in the ATM provisions for the Swedish aviation and which are the next steps?

A corner stone in the digitalization of the European sky is virtualization as in decoupling of people, geographical locations and systems. That is what providing tower services remotely does, decoupling between the airport tower and the systems and the ATCOS. The sensors eyes of the ATCOS are replaced by cameras, radars and other sensors. The situational picture is transferred over a network to a remote-control center. In this way we can co-locate many “towers” in the same building and find operational synergies. Technology will allow for one ATCO to manage several airports and when several towers and ATCOS’s are co-located the working environment benefits from the presence of other colleagues and their experiences. A positive spin off will be the support to the ATCO’s of the latest technology while in the old towers they might be working with older legacy systems. In the conservative ATM world this is a big change and involving people is of key importance as well as the interaction between human - machine – methodologies. Sweden was the first worldwide to go into operation with a RTS solution and we now have 8 airports but two different centers. It has been a challenging journey, and we are still working on improvements.   It must be considered as a strategic investment whit a big potential but we must work hard and be prepared for surprises. The transition will continue worldwide, and we can all learn from each other as ANSP’s.

LFV is one of the very few providers that delivers a cloud-based service to other ANSPs (AIM). What is the result of this experience and what’s in store for the delegation of technical operations between different ANSPs?

AIM is not exactly a cloud solution, but very similar, and a virtualized solution. With the new Aeronautical Data and Information Quality regulation,,  we realized that a new AIM system was needed. Initially we almost  bought a monolithic system but we decided  to enter  a partnership with a supplier providing systems based on an open and service-oriented architecture instead, including commercial agreements on rights to develop and integrate modules and to offer the software as a service. It was a new experience and in the end we chose  ENAV – owned company IDS AirNav.  We  also decided to create a cloud like solution  to flexibly and resiliently  support different customers, also outside Sweden. It has been a learning process together with IDS and internally, but we are very happy with our choice.. Again, radars and radios and not IT, so we must learn and be prepared for surprises We should bring in people with a solid IT background  as well as  people with the operational experience and  create cross functional teams. From the outset, we had no plans to extend the service to other ANSPs, but when presented the concept at conferences and won innovation awards, we were suddenly contacted by several ANSP’s that wanted to connect , one of the reason being avoiding investments and repeating the same development.  We now have other customers outside Sweden and others are expressing interest. It is a good example of one of the mantras in agile software development “develop once and deploy many”, which still doesn’t always happen in Europe. All in all, therefore, it is always a matter of dealing with new implementations, but the strategic way forward is the right one.

What is the added value of having a document as the ATM Master Plan and what priorities should the current update address?

We have a huge potential for improvements on the European and National level concerning cost efficiency, capacity, resilience, scalability and flexibility, speed of change, environment and safety but it requires a major transformation concerning man - machine and methodologies where digitalization and a seamless airspace cooperation are important parts. All transformations  need a  strategic plan supported by objectives, strategies and activities. In our industry change takes a long time and without the guidance from a plan it is easy to become fragmented when working as a group. Synchronization and planning  take a long time and a lot of effort. New technologies, new ways of working, new ways of working with safety and new certifications will be involved requiring new competences and mind sets. Therefore, we need something like the ATM Master plan. The current update has tried to foster a mindset that is deployment oriented and creates a clear before and after effect. In all transformations we must think in terms of what enablers we need before we can implement the real value creating applications. Enablers are often trickier to implement as they do not create value in the same way as an application, such as trajectory-based operations (TBO). However, without them, we can’t implement the real value creating applications. They also increase speed of change, flexibility, scalability and resilience. Large amounts of data will flow between different actors and systems in the future, and we will exploit automation to high levels, and everything must be done in a safe and secure way and we must bring in humans in the loop. Therefore, even though all the strategic deployment objectives are important in the ATM master plan we have as ANSP’s put a special priority on: Open service-oriented cloud-based architecture; Broadband air - ground connectivity and integration and Supporting financial and system regulation

We need the first two to increase speed and to enable other SESAR Deployment Objectives: we need supporting ATM regulation for today and the future. I feel the ATM Master Plan’ update caught attention even at CEO level, so I think that Europe is on the move, and we have an excellent window of opportunity to really pick up speed.