Red, amber or green it was fantastic to be back face-to-face in Madrid, says Maja Marciniak.
For the first time since March 2019 representatives of the air traffic management industry had the opportunity to come together and discuss their challenges in a face-to-face set up at the World ATM Congress (WAC) in Madrid.
The event was significantly different to what we have seen and experienced in the past. It was quieter than in 2019, but significantly busier than what I had expected. There was clear excitement in the air, with everyone happy to be seeing friends and colleagues (also those who we’ve only met virtually) in “the real world”. Going in, I thought that Covid restrictions would mean that there would not be any handshaking, hugging, and that social distancing would be visible everywhere. However, the organisers introduced a colour scheme for personal contact preference – a green sticker on the name badge meant that one is happy to shake hands, yellow meant that fist pumps were welcome and red meant “no physical contact please”. To my great surprise, the vast majority of attendees chose the green sticker, so handshakes were extremely common (and using hand sanitiser was hence equally common!). The one big thing that was missed was the lack of drinks and snacks on stands, which resulted in the event feeling slightly more formal than what I remember from previous years.
All in all, the congress was very well attended. I personally had numerous meetings with employees of air navigation service providers, various aviation organisations, system suppliers and a range of service provider companies. There was a common feeling that the world is now restarting, but at the same time that the financial impact of Covid has, and will continue to have, an impact on the innovation and investment seen in the industry.
The most notable absentees were EUROCONTROL (apart from a small delegation of representatives), the European Commission and associated bodies. In the past we have been used to seeing a large “European Village” which has tended to be the centre of discussions and talks on the future of the industry, progress on the implementation of regulation and European-wide ambitions for the future. This year, discussions were more dispersed, and mostly took place on stands and at the various speaking arenas, focusing more on solutions.
While there were numerous ANSPs who did attend the congress, it was my perception that compared to 2019, only a handful had their own stands. This is a clear impact of Covid – ANSPs have had to look for a wide range of cost reductions, small and large, and exhibiting at WAC does not fall into an obvious category of ‘essential expenditure’. Nonetheless, in the past when ANSPs had their own stands they used them to promote their activities, display their new solutions. This in turn had a propelling effect on European Aviation and also was a route to the commercialisation of ANSP activities. While in the short term I understand that cost reductions are necessary, I do hope that in the longer term we go back to having a more varied set of stands, further driving innovation and the exchange of ideas.
On the topic of exchanging ideas though, the 2021 WAC saw the establishment of no less than seven (!) different speaking arenas and theatres, which over the three days hosted presentations and discussions on everything from new tech and trial results to coping with traffic volatility and sharing strategic directions. On Tuesday, my colleague Isabel Franke-Chaudet delivered a well-attended presentation on The Impact of Standardisation on the ADSP Promise. The next day it was Simone Rozzi’s turn to take to the podium, discussing The Bottom Line on Human Factors Engineering in ATM Change. While I was unable to attend all of the talks that I wanted to, the ones I found particularly interesting related to the operations challenges expected in the post Covid world, which included (but was not limited to) environmental considerations and traffic volatility issues.
To illustrate the trending themes we took a look at the >100 presentations taking place across five of the seven theatres that were covering general ATM topics and created a tag cloud from the presentation titles:
