Collaborating to increase flexibility of controller validations

As part of our contribution towards the Single European Sky ATM Research (SESAR) programme, we have been working on the next phase of the Increased Flexibility in Air Traffic Controller (ATCO) Validations (IFAV) project.

The IFAV project intends to bring in tools for controllers to reduce the sector-specific knowledge currently needed for the licences, aiming to allow controllers to work more flexibly over a wider area. As part of this goal, we are also exploring whether increasing automation in the systems the controllers work on could potentially lead to more generic controller endorsements in future.

Currently, controllers need to hold a specific sector licence, made up of a Rating and a Unit Endorsement, to manage traffic within UK airspace. In certain parts of our operation, ATCOs are licensed for one or two sectors, meaning some can only work on very specific areas. There are also limits to the amount and/or mix of endorsements that controllers can hold due to the varying design, procedures and rules for each sector.

For this new stage of the project, we are bringing our ideas to life by developing prototypes of the support tools and presenting them to current ATCOs to get their instant feedback. This collaborative approach has allowed us to design a basic ‘skeleton’ prototype to present the idea to end users in a much quicker time, rather than creating a product that looks exactly how it will be implemented. Working with the controllers to get direct constructive feedback on these tools has enabled changes to be made in rapid time, saving us time and resource.

When we first demonstrated the skeleton wireframes to a group of controllers in February 2024, we received great feedback on the human machine interface elements, workflow and procedures, as well as the overall concept of operations. We were able to incorporate these suggestions into our next phase of prototype designs. In May 2024, we demonstrated these to another set of controllers to get a different view of the automation ideas reflecting the different systems the controllers use at our centres. This next round of feedback is now helping us to create a software prototype based on the original wireframes. We will continue this style of collaborative working on our prototypes until May 2025, where we plan to test our new tools in a validation activity. We will then propose the outcomes from this as ideas for future tool development and the combined research will be summarised into a whitepaper.

IFAV is a collaboration project with many industry partners that seeks to increase flexibility to support resilience in European operations. To help progress the IFAV3 project further, we will be contributing to a validation exercise next year, in collaboration with industry partners ENAIRE, CRIDA and INDRA which aims to test our controller support tools with UK controllers working on Madrid airspace. IFAV Tools will be adapted to Madrid’s airspace platform which will look at reducing controller workload and provide sector specific knowledge to support a controller working on a sector that they are unfamiliar with.

This project has received funding from the SESAR 3 Joint Undertaking under grant agreement No. 101114683 under the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme. UK participant NATS in IFAV3 receives funding from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) under the UK government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee [grant number 10091987].