Is Europe Outpacing U.S. on ATC Modernization?
In some fundamental ways, modernizing air traffic control in Europe is a more difficult challenge than doing so in the United States. Europe, after all, has over 40 national ATC systems in a region geographically smaller than the USA. Their challenge in creating a “Single European Sky” is the U.S. facility consolidation problem writ large. And while progress on that key objective has been limited thus far, in a number of other areas Europe seems to be making good progress toward a system based on the same basic concept of operations at NextGen. Where the United States has the Joint Planning & Development Office (JPDO) as the lead entity for NextGen, Europe has its SESAR (Single European Skies ATM Research) program. The former is primarily an inter-agency (i.e., intergovernmental) body while the latter is an industry-government consortium. As Aviation Week put it recently (April 14, 2008), “SESAR already has a much more well-defined organization to drive research and implementation.” Th
