With the advent of digital technologies, plenty of our current daily realities of air traffic control are undergoing radical changes, says Marc Baumgartner, SESAR Coordinator for the International Federation of Air Traffic Controllers’ Associations (IFATCA). In this article (recently published in the IFATCA’s Controller magazine), Baumgartner explores the opportunities and challenges generated by increased computing power and digitalisation. He also looks at new concepts, such as pairing processing power with human ingenuity, that are slowly emerging.
“While we can all agree that digitalisation fundamentally changes our society, nobody knows what will happen to air traffic control and air traffic management. The question WHETHER our domain will benefit from the increased computing power and netork has been replaced by WHEN and HOW,” he says.