In Geneva on 7 March 2023 was held the CANSO Executive Summit at "Airspace World.
Opening the Executive summit Simon Hocquard, Director General of CANSO emphasized the need for collaboration, by saying “collaboration, collaboration and collaboration"
ICAO Council President Salvatore Sciacchitano delivered the keynote address. He advocated for greater cooperation between air navigation service providers and ICAO to heighten the sustainability and resilience of the global flight network.
Highlighting the outcomes of the 41st Session of the ICAO Assembly (A41) and recent ICAO Council deliberations, the President underscored that achieving these priorities for ICAO and for the global aviation sector as a whole will require integrating the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, and effectively addressing challenges related to environmental protection, in particular climate change.
Panel Discussion: Pathway to our Integrated Skies
The next few decades will bring...
monumental change to the ATM industry. This panel, moderated by Simon Hocquard, discussed what airspace users of the future need, and the technology, innovation and workforce required by our future skies.Dr. Giorgio Cioni, Director of Armament and Aerospace Capabilities, Division of Defence Investment, NATO said that collaboration and cooperation is very important. High readiness is made by training and training meaning flying. "We need more technological applications to make more efficient utilisation of airspace. Institutional barriers have to be reduced. “We need to change to data centric approach”.
Akbar Sultan, Director, Airspace Operations and Safety Program, NASA Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD) said that safety is paramount, efficiency follows and some times the effort for and emphasis on being safe is not efficient. Data is not only simple info, data has to be translated into useful information. The "Sky for all" and the airspace will be different in the future. This leads to capacity issues and complexity and this increases the need for automation. "We need to collaborate with the industry and CANSO"
Willie Walsh, Director General, IATA said that needs to integrate and open up unnecessary use of the airspace for military. These areas must not be completely close for commercial aviation. There is scope for better communication and cooperation, "There are more that we can do". and the industry shouldn’t allow politics interfere in safety issues as it happened in the volcanic eruption of 2010.
Benjamin Binet, Vice President, Strategy & Technology, Thales said that” “We have to work towards Thales's integration of UTM with ATM via open architecture. ANSP also needs to change.
On the issue of the relation between safety and automation, the participants agreed that the industry should be afraid of the changes
in technology as “it knows how to do safety by design”. The industry should open up and introduce innovation. It is moving on to the digital automated future but the certification is keeping things back as automation has elements of security and safety.
It was stressed that the industry should move from declaration of intent and talk about collaboration to effective action.
George Bernard Shaw’s quote “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” was mentioned by Walsh.
