What can Air Navigation Services Providers do to make aviation more sustainable? How does sustainability integrate with the historical mission of maintaining a safe and efficient flow of traffic? In this episode, we explore various initiatives and ways of working through which ANSPs can contribute to this important and required change:

• Network management to avoid having aircraft waiting while in the air
• A-CDM to reduce waiting time on the ground with engines running
• Flexible Use of Airspace, to better share airspace between civil and military users
• Free Route Airspace, both nationally and internationally, to let aircraft fly the most direct routes
• Arrival Management, to reduce the time in holding patterns
• Continuous Descent Operations, to reduce fuel consumption and emissions during the approach
• RNP AR approaches, which save time by shortening the approach trajectories at airports with complex surroundings
• Use of drones to check radionavigation installations

The guest for this episode is Andrew Taylor,  Chief Solutions Officer at NATS. Andrew has a long-lasting career in ATM and has shared with us some very interesting view. We discussed the following:

• The job of a Chief Solutions Officer explained
• Where NATS stands with digital and remote towers
• Image recognition and interpretation as an application of AI in digital towers
• Can AI be used to detect deviation from clearances (stop bar overrun) without the need for a ground radar
• More use cases for other parts of AI, not related to image processing: decision making support tools and “virtual assistants”
• AI versus human in regards to errors: the dynamics of new type of hazards and incidents
• Acceptance and certification of AI, in general and at NATS
• AI versus ATCOs
• view on the future of ATM in the next 5 and 50 years

In this episode, Philip Butterworth-Hayes, the publisher of Unmanned Airspace shares his view on the future of UTM. We discussed the following:

• Position of Unmannedairspace.info and how you watch the industry
• The roles of ANSPs and the industry (USSPs, CISPs, …) in UTM
• The biggest UTM illusions that did not came true in the last years, and what are the next ones that will go down (or not)
• Role of local organizations (cities, counties,…) and the ownership of very low altitude urban airspace
• Evolution of UAM in the next 5 and 50 years

Janusz Janiszewski, CEO of the Polish ANSP PANSA shares his view on the future of ATM and UTM but also his experience leading during the COVID crisis.

• How PANSA leads innovation and digitalisation projects: iTEC, agreement announced with Indra and the status of the aviation innovation hub in Poznan
• The status of the development of UTM / U-Space in Poland
• The #businessPANSA initiative and how PANSA offers products, services and expertise to the ATM market, including the development of own tools, like CAT, TERMINUS, PANDORA, PANSAUTM and others
• The status of the Solidarity Transportation Hub project and PANSA share into it
• The role of PANSA leading the A6 alliance
• The evolution of ATM in the next 5 years but also in the next 50 years (this is a standard question we ask all guests)

The guest of this episode is Neil Bowles, the  Executive Vice President at Searidge Technologies. We discuss the following topics: 

• Use cases for remote / digital towers at large airports. Searidge projects in Hong-Kong 
  
  
• What Searidge brings to smaller airports in a real remote use case
  
  
• How do projects in the US or in the Asia Pacific region differ from European implementations
  
  
• Vision for ATM in 5 years & 50 years from now

The guest of this episode is Sharon Cooke, the CEO of Airways International, the commercial branch of New Zealand ANSP Airways. We discuss the following topics:

• The role and relationships between Airways and Airways international
• The products and services that Airways International brings to the ATM market
• "Airways Knowledge Online", the digital learning community for ATCO training and how it changed the training business, which also prove very useful in COVID times
• Completion of projects at intercontinental scale, like the delivery of multiple simulators to Norway out of New Zealand and how such distance is not a hurdle to projects anymore.
• The evolution of the ATM market in 5 and also 50 years

The guest for the second episode of the year is Marcel Bakker, the General Manager Systems & Infrastructure at LVNL, the Dutch ANSP.

• Brief overview of the TWR2020 project, decommissioning of paper strips, the new "polaris" radar and simulator center building, the start of remote tower implementation
• Next steps of these and other new projects
• How does the transition works in regards to LVNL continuing its own development of the triple A system to purchasing systems from industry providers (AMAN from DFS, joining the iTEC alliance, electronic flight stirps from FREQUENTIS, ...). Cultural impact on the organization
• Virtual center idea at LVNL 
• Evolution of ATM systems in the next 5 years but also in the next 50 years

This episode's guest is Steven Moore, the Head of ATM Network Operations at Eurocontrol. We discussed the latest trends in the ATM industry and the following:

• roles and activities of the Network Manager (NM) in terms of ATM
• COVID - opportunity to reconsider restrictions with the traffic increasing again
• How is the NM supporting The Free Route Airspace and how is it impacted? Will we go towards FRA at a larger scale, across FIRs and even FIRs from different ANSPs
• How is NM working on integrating "low level" newcomers from the drones industry
• What about newcomers at high level, targeting lower orbit and space
• What other initiatives is NM pushing for
• updates on iNM project 
• ATM and NM in the next 5 years and in the next 50 years

For this episode we have as a guest Christian Schleifer, the General Director at EUROCAE. We discussed the following:

• Goals, activities and members of EUROCAE
• How are the activities funded
• How can members contribute & What kind of organisation can join
• Latest activities around UTM 
• ED standards outside of Europe
• Future of ATM and of standardization in the coming 5 and 50 years

In this episode we had a guest from Portugal. Marcos Coelho Costa is the Member of Corporate Strategy and External Affairs at NavPortugal, the Portuguese ANSP.  The topic of this episode is Cooperations between ANSPs: Portugal’s Perspective and we discussed the following:

• The level of cooperation in air traffic management has been constantly increasing in the last decades - what does this mean concretely for NavPortugal
• Thought on the actual results of cooperation strategies
• As NavPortugal controls a lot of oceanic airspace, they co-operate outside of Europe too. What are the partners and what are the challenges of working with ANSPs thousands of miles apart
• Considering the long lasting collaboration with some Portuguese speaking ANSPs, how have NavPortugal achieved to maintain it and strengthen it throughout the years
• Tip to someone new to the domain wanting to look for new partnerships
• ATC in 5 years & in 50 years