Operational Feasibility of Sectorless ATM

Abstract

The current practice to organize the airspace and to balance demand and capacity is the partitioning of airspace into sectors. With the increase in air traffic a common practice has been to decrease the size of the sectors in order to limit the workload of the ATCos. However, this approach has its limits. With the increasing number of sectors the number of coordination activities will increase. In addition, a smaller sector size reduces the possibilities for controllers for tactical and strategic control. This contribution reports about a different approach: the entire en-route airspace (of Germany) as one large sectorless airspace. An aircraft that enters this airspace will be controlled by only one ATCo during its entire flight in this airspace. Furthermore, “instead of having two controllers controlling one sector containing n aircraft, one controller will be responsible for a limited number of m>2 aircraft, from departure to arrival terminal areas (TMA)”. An average feasible number of three a/c per ATCo was tentatively identified in the DLR / DFS project “Airspace Management 2020 (LRM2020)”. The new concept offers advantages over the traditional air traffic control: The traffic load can be easily distributed in a very balanced way over the controllers on duty. SESAR concept elements like business trajectories can be easily incorporated in this concept since the controller will have in mind the entire flight of his aircraft. He is only supposed to interfere in case of conflicts. A two weeks simulation campaign with eight experienced DFS upper area control ATCos has been carried out in 2010 to check the operational feasibility of the new concept.