The flexibilization of ATCO deployment allows to cover a larger geographical area with the same number of air traffic controllers (ATCO), while retaining, at least, the current level of safety and flight efficiency. Resulting in a reduction of personnel costs and an increase in ATC cost efficiency, offered flexible rostering process should be based on deployment of appropriate technical and non-technical means, supporting ATCO’s operational work.
The concept to achive these goals is based on the idea of introducing technical, and procedural enablers compensating the loss of local knowledge an ATCO experiences when reducing the local training, as well as to reduce the local knowledge needed by the ATCO in general to a minimum extent. In further steps, detailed technical requirements related to system capabilities and performance, as well as non-technical requirements, covering the ATCO training and currency scheme, were prepared and analyzed.
To limit the differences in operations across different sectors, and standardize operational procedures, new strategic and tactical procedural enablers were successfully investigated. Independently, innovative technical means, providing specific support to an ATCO were designed and are constantly being further developed. Validation activities will be conducted as a set of human-in-the-loop simulations in spring and summer 2022 and are currently prepared by the responsible project partners.
The last stage of the evolution of this concept, enabling fully generic controller validations, will completely remove any geographical reference of a unit endorsement. To make it possible, further scientific activities, including investigation of new strategies, and requirements have been started and are currently being performed.
The LDACS digital voice solution encompasses conducting flight tests and investigating the requirements for LDACS to be able to introduce digital voice capability. The goal is to replace analog voice communications with digital voice communications. Future terrestrial air-ground data links will improve connectivity between air and ground, which is essential to support future operational concepts.
For the flight trials, the project made significant progress with the preparation of the flight trials and the Technical Validation Plan (TVALP) for this Validation Exercise was drafted, too. Furthermore, the validation infrastructure for the flight testing was specified and progress was made with the development of the LDACS radios. The certification activitiesfor the flight trials have been started.
With reference to the introduction of digital voice into LDACS, progress was made with the definition of the proposed operational requirements and the potential use cases were identified. The existing LDACS architecture was analyzed and then the changes required to support digital voice communications were proposed. Special attention was paid to the introduction of the digital voice function into the LDACS ICAO standardization and to the preparation of the business case activities (starting from LDACS Datalink).
