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European air transport policy, emerged through the confluence of case law and legislation, in four broad areas: liberalization, safety and security, greening, and the external policy. Following the implementation of the single market for air transport, policy shifted to liberalizing and regulating associated services and in recent years to greening, the external aviation policy, and safety and security. Inclusion of air transport in the Environmental Trading Scheme of the European Union exemplifies the European Commission’s proactive stand on bringing the industry in line with emission reduction trajectories of other industries. However, the bid to include flights to third countries in the trading scheme pushed the EU into a controversial position, causing the Commission to halt implementation and to give ICAO time to seek a global multilateral agreement. The chapter also discusses how the nationality clauses in air services agreements breached the Treaty of Rome, and a court ruling to that effect enabled the EC to extend EU liberalization policies beyond the European Union, resulting in the Common Aviation Area with EU fringe countries and the Open Aviation Area with the USA. Another important area of progress was aviation safety, where the EU region is unsurpassed in the world, yet the Commission has pushed the boundary even further, by establishing the European Safety Agency to oversee the European Aviation Safety Management System. Another important area of regulatory development was aviation security, a major focus after the woeful events in 2001, but increasingly under industry scrutiny on costs and effectiveness. The chapter concludes by arguing that in the coming decade, the EU will strive to strengthen its position as a global countervailing power, symbolized in air transport by a leadership position in environmental policy and international market liberalization, exemplified in the EU’s external aviation policy.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a knowledge‐based decision support tool used for assisting en‐route air traffic controllers by generating resolutions for dual aircraft conflicts after being integrated into a model‐based conflict detection and conflict resolution system.

Air traffic controller knowledge, which was obtained from the literature research, about solving aircraft conflicts is represented in a decision tree. Then it is written in Visual Basic programming language. With reference to several rules form the expert air traffic controller knowledge and some factors which affect controller conflict resolution process, the tool generates advisories consisting of eight kinds of separation strategies.

The paper finds that it is expected to increase the safety of air traffic system by supporting air traffic controller in conflict resolution process. Controller workload can be reduced by fast, reliable and acceptable resolution advisories of the tool.

The accuracy of decision tree is limited with the adequacy and quality of knowledge obtained from references, several assumptions and interpretation. Because of the unavailability of a model‐based conflict detection and resolution tool, the tool could not be evaluated in simulations.

After being integrated into a model‐based decision support tool, it can reduce the deficiencies of the model‐based tool such as low degree of resolution acceptance by controllers and low‐resolution speed by providing expert air traffic controller knowledge to the tool.

Most of the existing approaches for flight collision avoidance are concerned with local traffic alone for which the separation is based on the pairwise analysis of aircraft trajectory trends, which is not efficient with regard to some flight path requirements along waypoints. The purpose of this paper is to deal with the global collision avoidance problem which aims at separating aircraft taking into consideration the global traffic in a given area instead of considering them pairwise. It aims to model the concept of global collision avoidance and propose a validated algorithm for the purpose in the framework of free‐flight.

The collision avoidance procedure computes online the appropriate speed and heading for each aircraft, at each sampling time‐instant, to generate a collision‐free flight trajectory along scheduled waypoints. The method accounts for automatic assignment of priority indexes that are updated from one control time horizon to the next. The paper considers here the case of aircraft flying at the same altitude, but the proposed method is easily extendable to the general 3D situation. Owing to the predictive features that are inherent to collision avoidance, the collision‐free trajectories are generated using model predictive control approach. A simulation example is presented in the end and its results show the suitability of the proposed approach.

Since the model predictive control approach is used, the collision avoidance procedure is anticipative; therefore, the avoidance capability depends only on the prediction horizon rather than on the control horizon.

The computation of the trajectory guidance information (speed and heading) at each time‐step is fast, therefore the proposed method is well suited for online processing requirements in real world applications.

The paper provides a flexible modelling framework and a computationally effective algorithm, both based on model predictive control concepts, to cope with global collision avoidance for flight safety enhancement in the framework of free‐flight.

Air traffic resources mainly include two parts, namely, air traffic controller (ATC) and physical system resources, such as airspace. Reasonable assessment and effective management of ATC and airspace resources are the premise and foundation of ensuring the safety and efficiency of air traffic management systems. The previous studies focussed on subjective workload control and the statistics of control communication time; they revealed the lack of kinetic universality analyses of controlling actions. Although frequency distribution patterns were generated by controlling the timing sequence, the correlation between the controlling actions and terminal airspace (TMA) sector capacity was not revealed. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Thus, given the immeasurable complexity of controlling actions and statistical features of the controlling communications, a dynamical model of ATC was built in this study to identify the frequency distribution patterns generated by controlling the timing sequence. With the Directorate of Operational and Analysis Task method, TMA sector capacity was estimated through multiple linear regression analysis.

With data from the Kunming sector, the power exponent was calculated as 2.55, and the mathematical expectation was determined to be 47.21 s. The correlation between controlling actions (workload) and sector capacity was obtained. Finally, the data were integrated in the verification of the model and its feasibility.

Airspace capacity is an index to measure the ability of the airspace system to deliver services to meet the air traffic demand. A scientific and accurate forecast of airspace capacity is a foundation of the effective management and rational allocation of the airspace resources. The study is of great significance for the efficient use of airspace resources, controller resources.

TO say that the Twenty‐fourth S.B.A.C. Show was an unqualified success is perhaps to gild the lily. True there were disappointments— the delay which kept the TSR‐2 on the ground until well after the Show being one—but on the whole the British industry was well pleased with Farnborough week and if future sales could be related to the number of visitors then the order books would be full for many years to come. The total attendance at the Show was well over 400,000—this figure including just under 300,000 members of the public who paid to enter on the last three days of the Show. Those who argued in favour of allowing a two‐year interval between the 1962 Show and this one seem to be fully vindicated, for these attendance figures are an all‐time record. This augurs well for the future for it would appear that potential customers from overseas are still anxious to attend the Farnborough Show, while the public attendance figures indicate that Britain is still air‐minded to a very healthy degree. It is difficult to pick out any one feature or even one aircraft as being really outstanding at Farnborough, but certainly the range of rear‐engined civil jets (HS. 125, BAC One‐Eleven, Trident and VCIQ) served as a re‐minder that British aeronautical engineering prowess is without parallel, while the number of rotorcraft to be seen in the flying display empha‐sized the growing importance of the helicopter in both civil and military operations. As far as the value of Farnborough is concerned, it is certainly a most useful shop window for British aerospace products, and if few new orders are actually received at Farnborough, a very large number are announced— as our ’Orders and Contracts' column on page 332 bears witness. It is not possible to cover every exhibit displayed at the Farnborough Show but the following report describes a wide cross‐section beginning with the exhibits of the major airframe and engine companies.

The purpose of this paper is to overview the systems and their elements developing for supporting the less-skilled pi-lots.

Several European (like EPATS, SAT-Rdmp, Pplane, Esposa, Clean Sky2) and national projects (NASA SATS, Hungarian SafeFly) develop the personal/small aircraft and personal/small aircraft transportation systems. The projects had analysed the safety aspects, too, and they underlined the aircraft will be controlled by so-called less-skilled pilots (owners, renters), having less experiences. The paper defines the cross-connected controls, introduces the methods of subjective analysis in pilot decision processes, improves the pilot workload model, defines the possible workload management and describes the developing pilot decision support system.

Analysing the personal/small aircraft safety aspects, a unique and important safety problem induced by less-skilled pilots has been identified. The considerable simplification of the air-craft control system, supporting the pilot subjective decisions and introducing the pilot work-load management, may eliminate this problem.

Only the system elements have been used in concept validation tests.

The developing pilot supporting system in its general form has on - board and ground sub-systems, too, except a series of elements integrated into the pilot cockpit environment and control system. Several system elements (sensors, integrated controls, etc.) might be implement now, but the total system need further studies. The subjective decision process needs further development of the methodology and concept validation.

The system may catalyse the society acceptance of the personal aircraft and their safer piloting, applicability.

The paper introduces an original supporting system for less-skilled pilots.

This paper aims to identify methods of guidance and supervision used in air traffic control training. It also aims to show how these methods facilitate trainee participation in core work activities.

The paper applies the tools of conversation analysis and ethnomethodology to explore the ways in which trainers and trainees act and interact in training situations. The data consist of the video recordings (total 38 hours) and ethnographic material gathered at a vocational institute for aviation and in two aerodrome control tower units.

The trainers used five different instructional strategies with which they guided and controlled the trainees' actions. In simulator training, learning was structured as a process through which the procedural knowledge possessed by the expert controllers was transferred to the trainees through interventions such as orders, test questions and additions. As the trainees progressed to the on‐the‐job training phase, interaction evolved from being trainer‐driven to trainer‐guided. The trainees' performance was fine‐tuned and guided towards local practices of particular work position by means of instructions and information deliveries.

The simulator training and on‐the‐job training appear as two distinctive forms of vocational training with their own aims. In order to improve the quality of the training, it is suggested that greater attention should be given to the ways in which these two separate areas of learning could be better reconciled.

This ethnomethodological study on training interaction complements the understanding of instructional strategies used at different stages of air traffic control training. It is proposed that research into the local and social production of training interaction can shed useful light on the complexities of workplace learning and training interaction, providing a novel perspective for those engaged in practice of vocational education.