Validating Sectorless ATM in the Hungarian Airspace: Results of Human in the Loop Simulations

Sectorless air traffic management (or Flight centric ATC as it is called in the SESAR context) has been researched at the German Aerospace Center DLR in close cooperation with the German ANSP DFS Deutsche Flugsicherung GmbH since 2008 and in recent years has been extended to the Hungarian Airspace together with HungaroControl. It is an en-route concept for air traffic control, where controllers are no longer in charge of geographic sectors but are assigned individual aircraft anywhere in the airspace. Controllers are responsible for the assigned aircraft from their entry into the sectorless airspace until their exit.Comprehensive validations activities were carried out successfully at HungaroControl in Budapest in early 2019. The whole Hungarian upper-airspace was simulated using the Sectorless / Flight Centric ATC concept with more ten air traffic controllers participating simultaneously in the validation trials. The validations have been run on DLR’s TrafficSim, a simulator which is capable of fast-time and real-time simulations. This paper reports about the concept in more detail and how it has been applied to the Hungarian Airspace, about the validation setup and finally about the results achieved during this validation activity.