Air traffic management
US alone, leading to flight delays while the facilities were temporarily closed for cleaning and a new team of controllers assembled. “We kept a lot of people at home on standby, on the basis that if we did have an outbreak, we had people […] we could bring in,” says Juliet Kennedy, operations director at NATS, which provides ATC across the UK. “We were trying to minimise the interactions people have as far as we possibly could and I think that really helped us.”
The UK managed to avoid much of the disruption the US was experiencing, aided in part to smaller domestic travel numbers and a more rapid drop in traffic. “It’s much easier for an [ATC] organisation to manage ten flights then it is to manage 100, so it’s easy to wind down,” Kennedy says. “The speed was the one thing that I think was a surprise to us. It did happen very quickly.” In the US, the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) also had to deal with how quickly traffic dropped. On 12 March 2020, the FAA was dealing with a seasonal high of 50,823 flights in one day. On 12 April, a month later, it was the low point for traffic handled by controllers, with only 10,757 flights – a 74% reduction.
The initial steep drop in traffic allowed the
FAA to protect its staff by separating and rotating teams, so that if someone became ill, there would be other teams that were not exposed. “We always had unexposed crews to substitute for crews that might have come into contact with someone who had the virus,” says Teri L Bristol, COO of air traffic organization at the FAA. “We have occasionally had interruptions in the system due to the need to clean a facility, but we’ve adjusted our cleaning routines to make these disruptions much less frequent.” Initially, when an FAA employee tested positive for Covid-19, the association emptied the facility in order to conduct a deep cleaning before allowing a new team to enter and operations to resume. By June 2021, the FAA had decided that it would be less disruptive to do a nightly deep clean instead, regardless of whether or not its employees tested positive for the virus.
The real challenge to the ATC industry – and indeed to the air travel industry as a whole – then, has been the lack of certainty over travel regulations by world governments, as countries enter and exit travel corridors seemingly at whim, one day on a nation’s green list, the next down to amber or red after news of a variant flare-up.
“The travel restrictions, particularly in the UK, have been really fluid,” says Kennedy. “What we don’t have is any certainty whatsoever over what the long-term forecast is – everybody’s got a different idea of when traffic is going to return. That makes it challenging for us to plan ahead, and the one thing that air traffic is based on is planning.”
Future Airport /
www.futureairport.com
Find the sweet spot However, while the pandemic has been a difficult period for the industry, it also offers some valuable lessons. It has shone a light on ATC’s lack of flexibility – it takes a long time to train a controller and its operators to work within a relatively fixed shift pattern, making it difficult to quickly step operations up or down to match fluctuations in demand. “We need to be able to more quickly match the supply of controllers to the demand from the traffic,” says Kennedy, who sees the length of time training takes up as the main issue. “[As] airlines are able to switch routes on and off [and] move routes really quickly, we find it more difficult to respond.” The pandemic has also forced ATC operators to work more closely with airlines and airports, who are struggling with problems of their own as they prepare to slowly begin to wind operations back up again. In the UK, the Department of Transport is attempting to coordinate across the industry to make sure it is ready for when travel restrictions are finally lifted.
10,757
Flights handled by traffic controllers on 12 April 2020, a 74% reduction on the month earlier due to the onset of the pandemic.
FAA
“It’s much easier for an [ATC] organisation to manage ten flights then it is to manage 100, so it’s easy to wind down. The speed was the one thing that I think was a surprise to us.”
Juliet Kennedy
This spirit of cooperation has proved to be helpful when dealing with another of the main effects on the pandemic – a lack of income across the whole aviation industry. NATS focused on its short-term finances, looking to minimise their costs as much as possible by starting a voluntary redundancy programme and reducing the size of its non-operational workforce. As ATC makes up a big part of airport costs, working to minimise its costs have allowed both sides of this partnership to continue their operations. “We’ve tried to work as closely as we can with them to make sure that we’re reducing costs for them as far as we can. We’ve focused very much on what can we do to build back better,” Kennedy says, co-opting one of the slogans of the current UK government. “If you’ve had a massive shock to the industry like this, then it’s a good opportunity to look at how you can do things differently and how you might want to build things back better in future.”
On the topic of rebuilding for the future, returning to prior traffic levels safely and efficiently also contains its own challenges, as many air traffic controllers have worked considerably fewer hours and managed fewer aircraft than they normally would have. Just like the reports of pilots struggling to shed their rust after missing out on a considerable amount of time in the cockpit, air traffic controllers will need some time to get back up to speed.
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