Sector-Less Air Traffic Management

The growth of air traffic raises the major concern of how to simultaneously accommodate increasing numbers of aircraft in an already saturated airspace, while maintaining safety at least at the same level, and all by improving the efficiency of Air Traffic Services at least through the reduction of incurred delays. Several attempts have been made in the past, to try resolving the problem. Several short- to long-term solutions have been initiated in the Free-Flight initiative and in the European Air Traffic Management Program (EATMP). Concepts such as UserPreferred Routes, Autonomous Aircraft Operations, Flexible-Use of Airspace, are the few examples of these attempts. However, the organisation of airspace into sectors remains a major constraint to growth in these concepts, since sector capacity is fully dependent on human capacity of solving the complexity induced by large number of aircraft in a sector. Based on the assumptions that, in near future, modern communication technologies, together with satellite-based navigation and surveillance technologies, could allow any aircraft to be monitored and controlled independently from traditional radar-based practices, we approach a new Air Traffic Management (ATM) concept that is free from sector constraints. Our work consists in exploring the possibility of controlling and monitoring aircraft individually, regardless which sectors the aircraft is supposed to fly through. In this paper we discuss the concept called Sector-less Air Traffic Management; its technical as well as its operational feasibility. This concept proposes a drastic change in the way we traditionally control air traffic: instead of having two controllers controlling a sector containing n aircraft, one controller will be responsible for a limited number of m aircraft, from departure to arrival terminal areas (TMA). The expected benefits are the simultaneous solution the current dead-block of capacity, safety, and efficiency with respect to air traffic growth.