Increased flexibility in the allocation of ATCO resources

Topic description

Specific Challenge:

The current operation requires that controllers hold both a licence for a particular rating (e.g. Approach Control Surveillance (APS), Area Control Surveillance (ACS)) and then a validation that permits that person to exercise their licence in defined volumes of airspace. The need for sector-specific training is not the only limiting factor: once a controller has been trained for a defined volume .of airspace, he or she needs to stay current. The AAS points to the need to control for a specific number of hours in a sector to maintain currency as being a key limiting factor

Increased flexibility in ATCO validation aims at developing and validating an initial concept that aims at increasing the flexibility in the ATCO validation. The solution will allow ATCOs to be allowed to work in a larger geographical area, number of sectors or sector configurations than they do today, increasing the flexibility of the controller-licensing scheme and optimising ATCO qualifications for a higher number of airspace configurations. This will be achieved by reducing the number of effective hours required to maintain his/her validation for working at full capacity. The solution also covers other use cases such as the consolidation of sector-groups or ATC facilities at night or other periods of low demand.

Generic Controller Validations represents a fundamental change of paradigm. The generic controller validations concept proposes to completely move away from the concept of controller unit endorsements. In order to achieve this goal, the geo-specific aspects of air traffic control would need to be removed as much as possible, and for those that remain adequate mitigations would need to be put in place to allow ATCOs to maintain a safe, orderly and efficient flow of air traffic in spite of having no local knowledge. The concept would allow an ATCO to work any airspace, anywhere, in Europe (or the world), whether managed with traditional sectors or without sectors, according to the flight-centric ATC concept, provided the controller held the appropriate operational validation for the position. This solution will make it no longer required that ATCOs work a minimum number of hours on a specific sector or flight-centric area for him or her to be able to provide air traffic control; instead, it is expected that there would be a generic currency requirement, so that controllers would need to exercise their operational validation for a minimum number of hours per period in order to stay current as controllers with the set of tools associated to their rating, rather than current in a specific geographical area.

The increased flexibility in rostering delivered by the solution is expected to finally result in increased capacity with the same ATCO resources.