We can’t go back to world before Covid, so let’s bring together different industries and ask new questions.I read several decades ago that 'as per' was little used outside of business correspondence and I have noticed since what I had already noticed then-that just as gold golds (per* Plotinus), babbitts babbitt. ‘It feels like something is going on in this industry and that we’re ready for big changes. Technology is evolving – connectivity, big data, data aggregation, AI algorithms – and has the ability to bring about big changes. There’s also a lot of potential to improve our carbon footprint with real-time flight optimisation tools. The real impact will come from the use of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).

So is this really a shift from one bucket to another but not an overall decrease of any magnitude? This is a really interesting thought that I don’t see being discussed and we should take a look at the bottom-line results as we make these technology decisions. Although this technology move is important in the overall evolution of our industry, we shouldn’t skip the impact of all of the data centres needed to support this digitisation and the use of power they require. There’s a lot of discussion around increasing digitisation in order to accomplish this. We need to increase the efficiency of how we travel through the airspace. Today we fly like we did 60 years ago and this can’t continue if we want to reduce our environmental impact. Supporting the environment is always a key topic in Skyguide’s regular reporting. If you think of the early use cases of moving people in large urban environments, there isn’t really an urgent need in Switzerland for this solution, so it’s still a bit in the future for this region. Regarding UAM, the time is not right in Switzerland. There is some work being done to address military and civil unmanned support at airports and something will be implemented in the spring of 2023. Dynamic airspace for drone operations is being worked with EASA and they are working closely with FOCA. This is being rolled out to regional airports. This is a semi-automated function, which still needs a supervisor to approve. Today Skyguide is supporting U-space with a special flight office that looks at anything that needs approval under this umbrella. There’s only so much airspace available, which doesn’t really lend itself to segregation. We talked quite a bit about activities in the unmanned space and the importance of unsegregated airspace. Another word of advice for other ANSPs is ‘watch legacy system use when planning your business case”. The longer you keep the legacy systems in the place, the bigger the impact on the overall business case. The idea is to switch off the older approach and tower legacy operations. Geneva’s location is 30 years old, which is older than Zurich and has more older legacy systems. The virtual centre concept allows them to function as if they are in one location. Switzerland has one airspace and two centre locations. The introduction of this concept was not without challenges. This has been delayed by one year with an increase of costs by 10% due to the current environment in our industry the last two years. The project is being completed in three phases and they currently are in the second phase. When asking Klaus what his advice is for other ANSPs who are considering such a move, his response was ‘do it’. Skyguide has been recognised in our industry with a bold move to the virtual centre concept. Central monitoring of flight information was the key area to be impacted. During the time of the outage, all voice and radar functionality continued to work. What we now need to determine is why this could lead to a 'clear-the-sky'. The problem was a routing table corruption in a core switch cluster which prevents redundancy to kick in. There was a first alarm very early Monday morning and with the 2 nd alarm the system went down. Additionally, the redundancy in the network did not work. One switch malfunctioned and stopped transmitting data across the network. The network architecture includes core switches and routers that support a mix of older and new platforms. As the issue was in the core network, it was not possible to shift air traffic control to a different centre in the region. Of course, we couldn’t have a conversation at the time of this meeting without discussing the recent outage that Skyguide was faced with which resulted in a three hour clear the skies gap.

I always enjoy speaking with Klaus as I come from a technology background and it’s great to get the take of someone who is really focused on the latest tech and how it can help our industry. ATM Magazine’s discussion was Klaus Meier, CTO, Skyguide was quite enlightening.

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