This year the major European event in air traffic control known as ATC Maastricht moved to Amsterdam's RAI and consequently changed its name to ATC Global. With the exhibition area being almost twice as large as the one in Maastricht's MECC also the number of visitors seemed to have increased.
Some of the stands were quite impressive regarding the effort spent to give demonstrations of the latest developments in ATM technology. However, from a research point of view not much innovative tools and facilities were shown. Of course, there were highlights again from companies like Saab, AviBit , SELEX or Frequentis. They showed quite interesting tower control tools, such as Electronic Flight Strips (EFS) and Departure Managers (DMAN). Innovative developments, however, such as route planning and conformance monitoring were mostly not on public display yet, as some of these tools are either still in stages of development or not mature enough to be sold. And selling still is one of the major drivers of this exhibition.
AT-One presented themselves as one of the leading research alliances in Europe and caught much attention with their hourly demonstration of ASAS flights. These flights were carried out by two flight simulators, one from NLR and one from DLR, approaching Prague airport. Another great feature of the AT-One stand was the flexible NARSIM-Tower simulator which was displayed in a small, moveable version, however, with all the functionality of its larger brother at the NLR premises.
Although I might have missed some of the items at display in Amsterdam this year, as time was limited, there was a demonstration at the Eurocontrol stand that caught my attention: Skybrary. I will dedicate another post to this new aviation safety wiki site soon.
