David McMillan, 欧洲控制（欧洲空中导航安全机构）
Release Date: 2009-01-23
You entered the Single European Sky ATM Research (SESAR) planning and implementation processes midstream. That's usually more difficult than starting something yourself. What have been the primary challenges you've had to face since taking over at EUROCONTROL almost one year ago in January of 2007?Well, not all of the challenges have related to SESAR, which is the technological component of the Single European Sky (SESII). I have been involved, off and on, in SESII for many years. SESAR is absolutely important to Europe, because it's about changing the way in which we manage air traffic. If you like, it's a kind of paradigm shift. At the moment, if you go and visit an air traffic control center, they are very modern places with all this fantastic equipment, screens, and computers. Fundamentally, air traffic control hasn't changed since it was invented. It's related to an individual controlling a sector of airspace in his head, these days aided by tools, and speaking to pilots by radio contact to tell them what to do. As the growth continues to come, and it will continue, the areas of air space which controllers are able to manage become smaller and smaller, so the handovers between them become more and more frequent, and eventually, the efficiency just goes out of the system. We are moving from controllers managing individual aircraft to controllers managing entire flows of aircraft. That's a fundamental difference. We are moving to data link connections between the ground and the air so as to give each aircraft the business trajectory it needs to get from Point A to Point B in as direct a fashion as possible.
The technology needs to be there to support all of that, and that's what SESAR is about. EUROCONTROL is an intergovernmental organization, one of the founding members of the SESAR Joint Undertaking (SJU), alongside the European Community. A lot has happened in 2008, but the challenge has been getting the relationships into the right place, making sure we are equipped and ready to support SESAR activities as they go forward.
There are several clear challenges including the necessary retraining air traffic control personnel and the need to secure continual funding in the years to come. What is the biggest challenge in this process from a EUROCONTROL perspective?
The challenges come in sequence. The first thing to do was to get all the different parties around the table to agree on the ATM master plan ?to achieve this, we had to build a broad coalition to get everyone to agree on what it is we're trying to do and to have the right concepts in place. We've done that and that's a major achievement. For the first time ever, you've got the air traffic management (ATM) specialist agency EUROCONTROL working with air navigation service providers, airlines, pilots, air traffic controllers, the industry that manufactures the equipment on the ground, and the industry that manufactures the equipment in the air inside a single organization ?the SESAR Joint Undertaking (SJU). .
The second challenge is to get the development phase to a place where this concept is translated into something which is deployable on the ground. The funding for that phase is in place. We have confirmed roughly €700 million each from EUROCONTROL, the EU, and industry. So there are €2.1 billion committed to the development phase. Going forward the amounts of money start to crack up quite fast, and we need to find the right business case for all of this investment. These days, aviation is a very commercialized world. Certainly, the commercial players will not make an investment unless there is a solid business case for that investment. But if you look forward, our growth projections remain robust. As in many other parts of the world, we are seeing a drop in traffic, and but by 2010, we expect the growth to be coming back. The business case should be there for this investment, so getting the financing is a key issue.
People are certainly another crucial component. Although we are changing the role of the air traffic controller, and indeed changing the role of the pilot in the aircraft, the human remains at the center of the system. We have already done a lot to persuade the air traffic controllers and the pilots of the need to change, and I don't think they quibble about the need to change. What they want is to be properly consulted and to be involved in developing the process for this change. There will be retraining, but that will come later when it is more clear about what the challenges will be. In the meantime, keeping these people onboard is fundamental for this project.
The other thing to say is that SESAR is not going to start delivering products for a number of years yet, so we've got to manage and optimize the system we've got, and get the best out of it until SESAR comes along in 2014.
Obviously funding requirements would change if you went beyond the current EUROCONTROL38 markets. How does expansion of this coverage area figure into your plans?
As you say, EUROCONTROL has thirty-eight member states, and the SESAR project concerns all of them. As a European organization, that's where our focus is. But, aircraft are mobile assets. These days they can fly from almost one part of the globe to another (almost anywhere) within a day. So at the end of the day, this has to be a global system. Thus, our other focus is in making sure that international connectivity is delivered. We do that in a number of ways. We, the SESAR Joint Undertaking (SJU), and the European Commission were the joint hosts of the European side at the recent ICAO conference in Montreal which focused on the next generation of ATM systems. We explained to the world what it is we are doing and listened to what our friends in the US and elsewhere are doing as well. We also had meetings with the air traffic organization of the CAAC in support of the international agenda of the SJU and the EC. Clearly, as the European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation, we have a particular responsibility, but it's not that we're only focused on Europe. We also must be part of the global solution going forward.
This system is much more comparable to NextGen in the US. Just how close of a collaboration do you have with your counterparts at the FAA?
We're trying to do the same thing. I was in Washington D.C. during the U.S. Presidential elections for the annual meeting of the Air Traffic Management Association. That was very much about recognising that SESAR and NextGen are not really competitors, but alternative means to deliver. We're working very hard to make sure that if you're an aircraft manufacturer, you don't need to buy a European box, an American box, a Chinese box, et cetera, to put in your airplane. You need to buy a next generation box, which makes sure that your avionics can make contact with all the equipped air traffic management associations throughout the world.
When it comes to the role of industry in this implementation, isn't there an inherent conflict of interest?
We are focused on what are going to be the modus operandi of the system, what are the outputs required in the system. We are not about designing a monopoly system that only Company X can provide. We are about designing functionality, which aircraft and the air traffic control organizations will need. Their people will compete to provide the best functionality at the lowest possible cost. It's not about fixing the markets so that Company X or Company Y gets the market. It's about deciding what kind of equipment and what kind of functionality will be needed, demonstrating that it can work, and then aligning the market to produce that equipment.
What new efficiencies do you expect to be created through the implementation of this next generation ATM system?
We have the joy of being in an expanding industry. Between now and 2030, traffic is going to double in the European market, so the efficiency comes in being able to deliver the service in this much bigger flow with roughly the same resources. We can generate a business case, provided that we can use the investment put in place to deliver the capacity which we need. But it's not just about capacity; it's also about delivering an environmentally effective outcome these days. Just recently, together with IATA and CANSO, EUROCONTROL put into place what we call a 'Flight Efficiency Plan', which is about taking all of the foreseeable things we can do over the next four to five years to improve the efficiency of the system. We'll be working together to reduce the distance flown between points, with the objective of getting as near as we can to the most direct route; to make sure that we handle aircraft properly, that we are as efficient as possible in using the airspace around our major airports and the routes in and out of the airports, and finally that we have optimum through-put of aircraft when they are on the ground. All of that is about delivering efficiency today. If we can provide this sort of capacity in the short term, that prepares us very well for the bigger gains to come in the future.
Going back to the issue of the environment, right now, at the ICAO, there's a bit of conflict regarding the recent change (or shall we call it progression) of European environmental policy. What are your thoughts on that?
EUROCONTROL is a technical organization, so we have two responsibilities regarding environmental issues. The first is that we have an excellent database for all of the aviation traffic in Europe. Every instrument flight rules (IFR) flight plan in Europe has been filed through this organization. We also have radar tracks for flights undertaken in European air space. We know the aircraft in the system. We know where they fly. We know how efficiently they fly. As a public service organization, this gives us the ability to put the facts of aviation in Europe into the hands of decision makers and politicians. Our second requirement on the technical front is to develop effective operational techniques to minimize the impact of each flight and make them available to our partners across the European continent.
As it happens, in my previous job as First Vice President of the European Civil Aviation Conference (ECAC) and spokesman for Europe on aviation and environment at ICAO, I led negotiations at the last ICAO assembly. I think it's important for the aviation industry to really take hold of the environment agenda and demonstrate that it's on the way to making things better otherwise the public acceptance of aviation will weaken. That would be a great pity, because aviation is one of the drivers of the economy and it has already done a lot to reduce its impact on the environment. If we can't demonstrate that we're taking serious measures to make things better, both through operational activity and possibly economic regulation of some kind, then we're going to have trouble.
This is great, but ATM cannot be developed in isolation when a much tougher bottleneck to efficiency is on the ground. Approximately twenty of the busiest airports in Europe are not going to be able to accommodate demand within the next 20 years or so, and beyond then, the situation only worsens. Might this threat undo in some ways all the planned improvements in ATM? How can EUROCONTROL work with its partners to mitigate this threat?
In November we published a new report, Challenges of Growth, which looks at the issues facing the growth of European aviation over the next twenty years. From that report, it's clear that there are capacity issues. They're not easy to resolve, but our ATM Master Plan does provide solutions. Actually, the biggest constraint in moving forward is airport or terminal capacity at our major airports. By 2030, we reckon that nineteen or twenty airports are going to be as congested through the whole of the day as Heathrow is now. That means congestion from the morning until the time it closes, if it closes. Half the flights in Europe are going to be going through those twenty airports, so the system will be very prone to delay - to exponential delays - throughout the day if something goes wrong.
I see it as one of my roles to explain these issues to policy makers. Airports have an impact on the local environment ?but at the same time, they bring jobs and huge economic prosperity to the region. They can be managed in an environmentally effective way, and we have techniques to make that happen.
We need to deal with these constraints, because if we don't provide the capacity that is needed, then you're going to have two consequences. You are going to have less wealth and less economic growth than you would have otherwise. Also, within the system you have remaining, you're going to have heavy congestion, with flights prone to delay, so in the end it will also be prone to being environmentally unsustainable. We need to tackle these issues as a whole, and not just in airports.
It seems to make so much sense. Is there a bit of a challenge in getting people to share the same vision?
In democratic societies, such as the one we have here, typically, the right to develop an airport depends on local politicians at the end of a complicated planning process. I was a little involved in getting Terminal Five into Heathrow. The planning process took almost twenty years from beginning to end. You can understand why that should be the case, but it's not a very efficient process. I'm certainly an advocate of the democratic right of a citizen to speak up about what this will do to them, but there has to be a more efficient process that is concluded in relatively brief time scale. We have a right to do that, and we haven't done it very well yet. In the UK the prevailing thought is that France did it better, but speaking with the French administration reveals that expanding Charles de Gaulle International Airport in Paris is proving very difficult as well.
I think this is an increasing challenge. There's plenty of evidence to show that as our societies become richer, people become less tolerant of the nuisances caused by airports. Even though aircraft today are only about 10% as noisy as they were twenty years ago, it's not the individual noise event that irritates people, but the continuous nature of the noise. We're sitting here at the end of one of the major runways in Brussels where an aircraft leaves every three minutes. At Heathrow this happens every ninety seconds. People become very sensitive to such a continuous load of noise.
It's not just a process of educating the public?
No, it's not, even though we educate the public as part of our duty. Nonetheless, we are working with the public to try to find a mode of operating which is the most sustainable and the least irritating.
In London Heathrow, Europe has a hub to the West where almost all of the slots are taken and capacity is maxed out. 60% of the air traffic in the world goes between North America and Europe. Berlin, for example, with the new Berlin Brandenburg International Airport (BBI) which should be operating in three years, has a vision of being a sort of hub to the East. Do you think it makes sense for one, two, or three European airports to possibly position themselves as a hub to the East?
The jury is still out on whether the hub airports or point to point will be the way forward. Different bets are being made on how the market's actually going to go, and I don't know if I would be able to pick which of those models is going to work. I guess actually that it's going to be a bit of both modes of air travel. There's going to be much more point to point traffic than in the past. If you look at the liberalized market that we've had in Europe for some years now, the growth in the market at the hub airports has continued, but it hasn't grown as strongly as in the secondary point to secondary point markets. I imagine that we will have much more aviation between secondary and tertiary points going forward.
It is clear that there will be an opportunity for an airport or two in the East of this continent to grow much more significantly than has been the case thus far. I think we're in a very interesting phase of development in the world where Europe can be a major player, China can be a major player, but we won't be the only ones. Places like the Middle East and India are really coming up and benefit from a geography that works quite well for them.
Speaking of which, recently there's been a horizontal agreement between the EU and India. How do such agreements impact on what you are trying to achieve at EUROCONTROL?
It's the case that the fastest growth rates are in the routes from outside Europe. But it doesn't make a fundamental difference to us whether the flights are between European airports or between European airports and a third country. It's obviously easier to handle overflying traffic than it is traffic that is taking off and landing, but the major issue is to ensure that flights are handled safely irrespective of the growth in traffic.
To what extent are you cooperating with organizations other than your counterpart in the US? When we look at the BRIC economies, for example, is there an emphasis to collaborate, to make sure that their systems are in line with what you are developing here for Europe?
One of the real purposes of having the NextGen/SESAR conference in Montreal in September was to make sure we weren't just talking to ourselves and the US, but also to the world, and we want the world talking to us. At the moment, the bulk of aviation is contained in the EU and North America, but this is all gradually changing so you can't ignore the fact in plans to produce aircraft and logistics equipment. We need to have systems that work across the planet in a seamless manner. So the important thing for us is to make sure that we have connectivity with countries outside of the markets that we know best, so that we can develop an interoperable world system. That's absolutely crucial to what we do, and anything which makes that more difficult is a disadvantage to everybody. We're not interested in that. We're interested in cooperation and we want to see it happen.
With regard to China, Mr. Bisignani, Director General and CEO of IATA, went on the record saying that tremendous defragmentations have been achieved in Chinese airspace, but there's still plenty to be done. What are EUROCONTROL's particular goals with regard to interaction with China?
We're a very willing partner for the Chinese authorities if they want us to help them. We had some initial contacts at the NextGen/SESAR conference, and we followed up by sending some of our people out to an EU event in China after that. I think where Europe can explain to China what we have done, which could be of interest, is in the sophisticated techniques which we have developed here to manage the flows of traffic across Europe. At EUROCONTROL, we have the Central Flow Management Unit (CFMU). This was set up in the late 1980s, when Europe was facing appalling delay problems. How do we stop that happening? We set up very sophisticated software and computer generated techniques, which enable us to even out the flows of traffic while matching system capacity with demand throughout Europe. We have techniques in flow management which are world-leading, and we're certainly willing to talk to other countries about how to implement those successes. It requires significant investment in high tech computer equipment, a new approach to flight planning, and the establishment of central coordination of slots and routes. If you do that, there are real gains to be made - and technology is continually being improved.
We also have a lot of experience in Europe in what we call the 'flexible use of air space.' In this approach, we as a civil air organization work with our military colleagues to ensure that reservations of air space for military purposes are kept to the minimum, so that the air space concerned is freed up for civilian traffic as much as possible. We also then have to work with our civilian colleagues to make sure that their flight planning systems are responsive and flexible enough to be able to take up these opportunities when they come around. When you also consider that we are one of the world's leading developers of systems for handling traffic in and out of congested airports, then there is clearly plenty of potential collaboration with our Chinese colleagues. We can do plenty even in advance of SESAR and NextGen.
You're going to lead a panel at the EU Civil Aviation Summit in Bordeaux. What to you expect might be some of the hot topics there?
It's what we've been talking about. At the moment, we have an airline industry that is going through some pretty hard times. The industry is torn between wanting us to do everything we possibly can to optimize the existing system and the knowledge that in the future they're going to require a lot more capacity. There is a little bit of tension about how we're going to deliver this in the future and where the funding will come from. Then, the environmental voices will start to ask, 'You're planning for all this growth in the future, but are you sure that it's really sustainable to deliver that growth? Do you really think that your projections about the economy going forward are right? Do you actually need all this capacity? Shouldn't you have a pause before you carry on with all of your plans for the future?' We'll have to see where the debate goes, but in my mind, we have to learn from the past when societies have made the major mistake time and time again during times of relative economic weakness to postpone or delay investments for the future. If you do that, the cycle overtakes you and things actually get more difficult.
Yes, that would seem short sighted?
In a company, there is always the temptation to focus on resolving today's issues. But I think it's important for public policy makers and industry leaders to take a slightly more long term look at what's going to be needed. I will certainly be articulating the need to focus on getting the system efficient today. If we don't, tomorrow will be here and we won't be ready. We have to prepare for it.
What is your final message to your counterparts in China in regards to putting together a safe and sustainable aviation sector?
First, we've got to recognize together that if our estimates are correct, by 2030, the level of traffic between Europe and China will be six times what it is today, which is an average annual growth rate of between 7% and 9% per year. This will take us from 15,000 departures in 2007 to between 70,000 and 115,000 flights per year. There's obviously a substantial relationship to be developed. There is already a relationship in technical terms, which we tend to foster through ICAO and also through some bi-national contacts, but we are clear that we can't operate as an island, and I'm sure China has the same view. This is a global business with a global impact on the world economy, environment, and society. Essentially, we all have the same challenges: safety, efficiency, environmentally sustainability, and economic effectiveness. We've got a lot to learn from each other and we should work together.
| Company: | 欧洲控制（欧洲空中导航安全机构） |
| Position: | Director General |
| Country: | 比利时 |