Greater safety and efficiency at airports
- DLR is leading two of the 25 projects of the EU research programme SESAR 2020, which has a budget of 585 million euro, for safer and more efficient air traffic management.
- In the 'Remote Tower' project, 39 international partners are working on coordinated solutions to ensure that multiple airports can be safely and efficiently controlled from a remote tower centre.
- The Integrated Airport Operations project aims to demonstrate the innovations from the previous SESAR 1 research programme, intended to increase safety, capacity and environmental friendliness, for integration into the European air transport system.
The modernisation of air traffic management is one of the main challenges of current aeronautics research. For this reason, the European Union initiated the Single European Sky ATM Research Programme (SESAR) within the Horizon 2020 research framework programme. Two of the projects with a focus on the safe and efficient airport of the future are now being launched under the leadership of the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR). They will focus on the use of remote tower technology that enables the provision of single or multiple aerodrome ATS from a remote tower centre and extensive testing of new air traffic management developments on the ground.
World's largest remote tower research project
The Remote Tower concept aims to enable air traffic controllers or flight information service officers to provide air traffic service to rural airports with usually low traffic densities from a Remote Tower Center using camera video streams, instead of the conventional view from the control tower at the airport. "In the PJ05 Remote Tower project, 39 international partners from industry, air navigation service providers and research organisations are working together on developing tailored solutions to operate multiple airports from a Remote Tower Center in a safe and efficient way," says project coordinator Joern Jakobi from the DLR Institute of Flight Guidance. "Our aim is to make the remote tower concept fit for the purpose of providing safe, high-quality and cost-effective air traffic services to multiple airports from a single controller working position. As a result, smaller airports will in future remain sustainable meeting the global demand for increasing mobility and networking." The EU is funding approximately 50 percent of the approximately 18-million euro project. Small airports in Hungary, Germany, Sweden, Lithuania, Norway, Slovakia, Italy and Poland provide validation platforms for the research work.
Large-scale demonstration of innovative airport management
Innovations from the previous SESAR 1 research programme are intended to increase safety and capacity while reducing fuel consumption and delays. These are now being implemented in a large-scale demonstration. "The PJ28 Integrated Airport Operations project aims to demonstrate the solutions developed and validated in SESAR1 in a live environment that is as realistic as possible," says project leader Steffen Loth from the DLR Institute of Flight Guidance. "Specifically, it involves supporting the application and integration of the systems developed in SESAR1 in the European air transport system and, through demonstrations, convince users to implement them in the European air traffic system." The project, with an overall cost of approximately eight million euro, is receiving some four million euro in funding from the EU. Individual large-scale field tests are planned at Hamburg, Nice and Budapest airports. The airport demonstrations will be complemented by two on-board demonstrations, in which the new solutions will be used in the aircraft. Eight European partners and consortia are participating in the trials, including Thales, Honeywell, DSNA, Airbus and Indra, as well as the NATMIG and B4 consortia.
Leadership of both SESAR 2020 projects is formally held by the AT-One consortium, which includes DLR as a consortium leader, as well as the Dutch organisation NLR and industry partner Rohde & Schwarz. Both projects are part of the 25 undertakings of the SESAR 2020 programme, which has 585 million euro of investment.
The SESAR programme (SESAR1 and SESAR 2020) is the technological response to the major challenges in European air traffic management (ATM). The goal of the SESAR Joint Undertaking (SJU) is the modernisation of the European ATM system, in order to put an end to the congestion of European air space and reduce the environmental impact of air transport. This will be achieved through the coordination and summarisation of all pertinent research and development activities by the collective. Partnership, sustainability and user-orientation are the key concepts of the SJU, which was initiated in 2007 by the European Union and EUROCONTROL. In addition to the two founding members, it brings together 19 members from industry, over 100 associated companies from the ATM sector and more than 60 universities and research institutes.
After the SESAR 1 programme running from 2008 to 2016 with a budget of 2.1 Billion euro SESAR 2020 has been launched running from 2016 to 2024 with a budget of 1.6 Billion euro and a total of 25 projects in wave 1 (2016 - 2019). Both projects receive funding from the SESAR Joint Undertaking, PJ05 under grant agreement No 730195 and PJ28 under grant agreement No 731787 under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.