Impact of Flight Centric Air Traffic Control on the Cost Efficiency of Air Navigation Service Providers

The Flight Centric ATC concept describes a new type of air traffic control. Conventional sector boundaries are dissolved and the entire airspace is considered as a single airspace. In this airspace, several controllers share responsibility for monitoring the aircraft. This makes it possible to distribute the workload evenly among all controllers and to reduce the total number of controllers due to increased ATCO productivity. This paper will use the results of a workload formula developed in-house to illustrate the impact of the Flight Centric Air Traffic Control concept on air navigation service providers. For this purpose, the demand of air traffic controllers will be compared for both concepts (sectorized vs. Flight Centric Air Traffic Control). A conservative analysis shows that the productivity of air traffic controllers can be increased by up to 20 percent for the en-route area, which has a significant impact on the number of controllers required. In a corresponding cost-benefit analysis based on Eurocontrol's standard assumptions regarding traffic growth, these savings have been compared with the expected implementation costs for air navigation service providers and calculated for the period from the start of deployment up to 2050. The results show that an increase in efficiency of just one percent can lead to savings of 118 million euros for the air navigation service providers in Europe.