Flight Centric ATC: Reflecting Three Years of Research on an Efficient and Eco-friendly Air Traffic

Abstract

This paper presents the Flight Centric ATC (FCA) concept, which has been investigated as part of the Single European Sky Air Traffic Management Re-search (SESAR) 2020 Programme over the last three years, combining the increase of airspace efficiency with the aspect of environmental sustainabil-ity. The FCA concept distance itself from the classical airspace structure consisting of sectors in which in Europe typically one controller team is re-sponsible for all aircraft. Instead, the FCA airspace is seen as a uniform area in which several controllers are each responsible for a certain amount of air-craft. In combination with other conceptual approaches such as the Free Route Airspace and the use of controller support tools such as the Conflict Detection & Resolution, flight trajectories in FCA can be optimized and con-flict situations between two or more aircraft can be solved with the least pos-sible trajectory deviations. The concept also enables a better distribution of the overall workload among all controllers, avoiding the overloading of indi-vidual controllers and making more effective use of their capacities. With those effects, FCA enables a reduction in the total fuel required and at the same time decreases the emission of environmentally harmful CO2.