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

Leonardo joined the SESAR programme in 2007, deciding to take part in this initiative and contribute to building up the “Single European Sky”, to become a key player in future Air Traffic Management. Today, Leonardo is among the top industry key players participating in the new SESAR 3 JU partnership. Leonardo believes that being part of the SESAR community is an opportunity to build together the future Single European Sky contributing to the development of cutting-edge technologies and their deployment.

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

Leonardo leads the twin transformation of digitalisation and sustainability across all its product lines. The digital transformation of Air Traffic Management is key to its safety, sustainability and efficiency.

In Leonardo we have many years of experience in Air Traffic Management, covering Air Traffic Control systems, communications, and sensors for navigation and surveillance deployed in over 100 countries worldwide. Therefore, in Leonardo we are developing technological enablers for bringing digital transformation in both ground and air domains.

We develop products and services for managing the current and future Air Traffic Management, ensuring that all types of air platforms will operate safely and sustainably in the upcoming Single European Sky.

What are Leonardo’s top three innovation priorities?

Leonardo has recently launched a massive digitalization programme called Digital Continuum which is made of four key pillars, AI (Artificial Intelligence), Cloud and High Performance Computer, where we play a leading role worldwide, and Quantum Computing.

We believe that SESAR is the perfect environment for the Digital Continuum because its objective of making air transport smarter, more sustainable, connected and accessible, to deliver a Digital European Sky requires a very strong capability of managing big data which is directly connected to a performance of High Performance Computer, of managing and maximizing best trajectories of flights whether they are manned or unmanned and last but not least having a connected cloud where all the airspace users can interact with each other in a multidomain environment.

So, we strongly believe that SESAR is a great opportunity where we can apply this new vision of Leonardo.

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

Leonardo with its subsidiaries is interested in all flagships of the Digital European Sky programme for medium and long-term deployment scenarios. In particular, the Connected and Automated Air Traffic Management is an important topic to us since the development of the new infrastructure can improve Communication, Navigation and Surveillance domains.  Leonardo is actually coordinator for the Integrated Communication Navigation and Surveillance Infrastructure Project (SESAR 2020 PJ14-W2) , applying  Artificial Intelligence and Trajectory Based Operation through the use of SWIM.   The advance in this sector is strongly related to the development of the U-Space and Urban Air Mobility.  Air-ground integration and autonomy will also take an important role in the future of Aviation.

Finally, Civil-military interoperability & coordination, with the Aviation Green Deal also represent crucial issues for us, especially after the dramatic events occurred in the last years.