Dr Ugur Turhan from UNSW Canberra examines what recent air traffic disruptions reveal about the challenges facing Australia's aviation system and why building future resilience will depend on investing in people, skills and technology.
Recent near-miss incidents at Sydney Airport have brought air traffic management into unusual public focus. Most passengers rarely think about air traffic control (ATC) until their flight is delayed or cancelled.
While the cause of these recent incidents is still under investigation by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), controlling air traffic is much broader than whether enough controllers are available on a particular day.
The bigger question is how Australia builds an air traffic system with the people, skills, technologies and resilience needed for a more complex future.
In aviation, safety comes before maintaining the timetable. If available air traffic control capacity cannot safely handle planned traffic, traffic levels have to be managed accordingly.
So, a delay can sometimes be the visible consequence of a safety system protecting its margins.
Air traffic control is about capability, not just numbers
It is tempting to think of an air traffic controller shortage like any other workforce shortage: recruit more people and fill the vacancies.
It is not that simple.
Controllers perform a central role in one of the world's most safety-critical and interconnected industries. Selection and recruitment of new air traffic controllers is only the beginning.
We need to attract motivated candidates who see themselves as well suited to the profession, select those with the right aptitude, train and qualify them effectively, and continue supporting their operational and professional development throughout their careers.
I think of this as a capability lifecycle.
Qualification should never be considered the end of learning. Controllers need to continue developing as traffic, procedures and technologies change.
They also need to remain prepared for situations that, fortunately, may rarely occur in real life: emergencies, severe weather, communication failures, equipment problems and unexpected combinations of events.
We cannot wait for a real emergency to provide that experience.
This is why high-fidelity real-time simulation is so valuable. It is not only a place to teach basic skills with teamwork competencies, but can expose experienced professionals to unusual and demanding situations and allow them to practise responding under pressure without creating risk in the real aviation system.
After many years working with ATC simulation, I see this as one of its greatest strengths: we can practise the situations we hope never happen.
Australia and new aviation technology
Australia is investing in new aviation infrastructure, digital aerodrome services and increasingly automated air traffic management systems, including developments associated with Western Sydney International Airport.
These investments create major opportunities for safety, efficiency and capacity. But every technology transition also has a human side.
Engineers often talk about Technology Readiness Levels. We should also think seriously about Human Readiness Levels - whether the people who will operate, supervise and work alongside new technology are ready for it.
Technology readiness and human readiness need to progress together.
There is little value in highly mature technology if operational staff have not had enough opportunity to understand it, recognise its limitations and practise what to do when it behaves unexpectedly.
This becomes even more important as artificial intelligence and decision-support systems enter aviation. Real time, human in the loop ATC simulation can add value safely in developing and validating new AI tools and decision aids for controllers. For instance, digital tower simulator can be deployed as a digital twin of the new aerodrome concepts to validate and improve new ideas and procedures.
The future is therefore not simply humans versus automation.
It is increasingly humans working with automation.
Simulation allows us to practise the situations we hope never happen, so people are ready to respond safely and effectively when the unexpected occurs.
Safety involves the whole system
We tend to talk about aviation through its most visible actors: pilots and air traffic controllers.
But safe aviation involves many more people.
Airport operators, engineers, ground handlers, tug drivers, airlines, safety specialists, regulators, technology providers and researchers all contribute.
Safe aviation is not created by controllers and pilots alone. It is created by people and organisations working effectively together.
This is why simulation should increasingly go beyond training individuals in isolation.
We can put controllers, pilots, airport personnel and other operators into the same simulated emergency and examine where communication works, where it fails, how workload changes and whether everyone develops the same understanding of the situation.
We can also learn from events that have already occurred.
Using investigation findings and operational records, incidents and accidents can be reconstructed in simulated environments. We may never reproduce every detail perfectly, but we can recreate known or plausible conditions and examine how communication, workload, procedures, technology and decision-making interacted.
Then we can test alternatives.
What happens if a procedure changes? What if information is displayed differently? What if another safety barrier is introduced?
That turns an occurrence into an opportunity for systematic learning.
Simulation can therefore be much more than a training device. It can be a training environment, research laboratory, safety-learning platform and testbed for future aviation systems.
A local disruption can become a global problem
Air traffic management is also globally connected.
A delay in Sydney does not necessarily end when the aircraft leaves Sydney.
The aircraft may arrive late at its next destination. That can affect another flight, crew duty times, passenger connections, gates and airport resources, and have a snowball effect for all stakeholders.
One disruption can propagate through the network.
This is why resilient air traffic management matters beyond one airport or one country. A local operational constraint can have national and international consequences.
Australia should bring its capabilities together
At UNSW Canberra, we have established an air traffic control simulation capability that allows complex airport and airspace operations to be reproduced without introducing risk into live operations.
But the opportunity is larger than one university or one simulator.
Australia already has considerable capability spread across Airservices, airports, airlines, Defence, regulators, government, universities, research organisations and technology companies.
We should connect those capabilities more deliberately.
Operational expertise can be combined with simulation, human-factors research, safety analysis, data and emerging digital technologies.
Working together, we can test not only whether a technology works, but whether the whole operational system is ready to use it safely and effectively.
That includes conventional air traffic management, digital/remote tower operations, automated decision support, civilian and military drone integration, and future shared-airspace concepts.
Australia is already investing significantly in the physical and digital infrastructure of future aviation.
Our next challenge is to make sure our human capability, education, training and system interoperability develop at the same pace.
Preparing Australia's air traffic system for a more complex future is not simply about more people or more technology.
It is about capable people, mature technology and connected organisations being ready to perform together - especially when something unexpected happens.
