Validation of the Flight Centric ATC Concept using Hungarian Airspace as an Example

Abstract

Flight Centric Air Traffic Control (Flight Centric ATC or FCA) describes a new concept of airspace design and the way air traffic controllers work in an enroute environment. The elimination of conventional sector boundaries and the associated restructuring of air traffic controllers' working methods are intended to reduce the capacity bottlenecks of the steadily growing air traffic in Europe. At the same time, the concept enables a more even distribution of the entire traffic volume among all controllers on duty, for example within one area control center (ACC), on the basis of a workload-based allocation. This distribution and the elimination of the boundaries, in turn, provides more capacity both in the airspace itself and in the use of the total controller capacity. This means, that the same number of aircraft can be controlled with less controllers when applying the Flight Centric ATC concept than in a sectorized airspace. In this paper, the latest research results collected within the framework of the Single European Sky ATM Research Programme (SESAR2020 Wave 2 PJ.10-W2-73 FCA) are discussed. The focus lies on the Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) campaign, which was conducted by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in cooperation with Frequentis and HungaroControl for the Hungarian airspace.