What is the added value of being a member of the SESAR 3 JU?

Being a founding member of SESAR lets us receive a wide range of valuable resources and updated information. Within the programme, there are different established fora, which promote the collaboration of the entire industry to define a new way of working. By sharing bright ideas and challenges, innovation is stimulated within the aviation sector to address deficiencies, achieve more resilience, scalability and a more efficient infrastructure, as well as promote a smarter and more sustainable air transport area, making it accessible to all airspace users. This commitment shown by aviation stakeholders confirms the willingness to solve the difficulties to be able to travel by plane leaving a minimal environmental footprint, leveraging digital technologies to transform the sector and reaching a high degree of automation, both on air and at airports. Being a member of the partnership also brings the possibility to work closely with standardisation entities, allowing us to keep up with regulatory framework.

Why is air traffic management and its digital transformation important to Aena?

Air traffic management provides a crucial service for the travel industry, and through its digital transformation, plays an essential role in enabling smart airports to become more fully integrated into the ATM network and the aviation sector to thrive. Through the research and development of operational use cases as well as the advancement of key innovative technologies, aviation-critical challenges are tackled, highlighting synergies with all relevant digital initiatives that will drive the industry to achieve the Single European Sky. This digital transformation will help to erase the inefficiencies in the current framework, solving capacity bottlenecks, optimising the services on offer, improving the passenger experience, and reducing maintenance costs. This technical revolution will also contribute to optimising airport infrastructure through advanced collaborative operations and services, as well as the deployment of a future architecture that provides higher air-ground integration enabling urban air mobility on a wide scale.

What are Aena’s top three innovation priorities?

Innovation and digital transformation at Aena are endorsed using new technologies that could help our organisation to improve current operations and develop new business opportunities. We aim to:

• Improve customer experience: By deploying technologies to simplify the customer's journey and transform it into a seamless process. This required knowing our customers in order to offer them an optimal and personalised experience, allowing them to spend their time at the airport in the most useful, pleasant and comfortable manner.
• Increase operational efficiency: By automating airport management processes, driving towards “as a service” models, and intensifying our efforts to enhance our performance.
• Develop new businesses around sustainable mobility: By exploring new areas, speeding up the modernisation of our infrastructure to offer greener capacity, making it more resilient, reducing the environmental impact of aviation as well as other unwanted effects and improving air quality.

In which flagships of the Digital European Sky programme is Aena particularly interested in getting involved, and why?

Aena is particularly interested in getting involved in:

• Aviation green deal: With the goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, it is necessary to intensify efforts to reduce emissions as well as the modernisation of aviation infrastructure.
• Multimodality and the passenger experience: To enable travellers to complete their journey, door-to-door, it is necessary to optimise the performance of the entire journey.
• U-space and urban air mobility: To unlock the potential of the drones enabling urban air mobility (UAM), it is necessary to develop new digital services and operational procedures.
• Air-ground integration and autonomy: To move towards more autonomous operations, closer integration and advanced capabilities are needed to work in a seamless and safe environment.
• Connected and automated ATM: To operate with higher levels of performance and resilience, new emerging digital technologies need to be exploited.