How long will it take us to submit to the Laws of Physics?

Back in 2012, ICAO proposed the Collaborative Air Traffic Flow Management (Doc. 9971), suggesting that, "at highly congested airspaces, ATFM services should make use of collaborative decision making processes, to balance capacity and demand, within different volumes of airspace and airport environments".

The message was pretty clear !

Whenever air traffic demand exceeds capacity (does anyone still doubt it happens ?), flights above airspace/airport combined capacity, should be held on the ground, by means of CTOTs (Calculated Takeoff Times), of a Ground Delay Program (GDP), as a means to balance Demand and Capacity at the congested sector.

Why ?

Laws of Physics !!! Two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time !

Capitalist greed and the naive tendency of human beings to believe that we can override the Laws of Physics, led us to ignore ICAO′s recommendation and rewrite the essential principle of the so-called "CDM operation":

Let′s just "cooperate and share information", and we will be able to indefinitely grow air traffic, clogging the airspace and the surface of airports, with aircraft and vehicles - Technology will always be there to save us !

So, here we are:

• squeezing flights within airport and airspace finite dimensions
• hoping new processes and technologies will enable us to have landing flights crossing the threshold, with a departing flight still in its takeoff run, on the same runway
• expecting Air Traffic Controllers to exceed their "Movement Area" responsibilities, by efficiently "managing" aircraft and vehicles, within an increasingly crowded non-controlled zone, quite often in "blind mode" (why see them ?)
• pushing passengers into aircraft and closing doors, to make them believe this will lead to them to arrive any sooner at their destination (though we know they won′t !)
• And last, but not least, pretending we are extremely concerned with fuel costs and CO2 emission, while we turn our air transport operation, at peak times, into the best possible example of fuel waste and environmental aggression !

Ok, we can do that, but our insanity does not supersede Laws of Physics, and they will eventually remind us of that. Let′s hope Artificial Intelligence come rescue us from Natural Ignorance !

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Saab, Inc.

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