Paul-Franck Bijou is Chief Executive Officer of Airbus ProSky. Mr. Bijou was previously Vice President of Global Customer Affairs for Airbus ProSky and CEO of Quovadis, Airbus ProSky's Performance-Based Navigation (PBN) services subsidiary. Prior to joining Airbus ProSky and Quovadis, Mr. Bijou was a member of the Airbus Business Aviation Aircraft Sales Business Unit. He was also the COO of Dassault Falcon Service, a business aviation airline based in Le Bourget, until 2004. As an Operations Engineer graduate from French National School of Civil Aviation (ENAC), he spent the first part of his career in airline flight operations and economy of flight transport.

First of all congratulations for your new appointment; as CEO of Airbus Prosky what are your first priorities? 

Thank you. I am delighted to have been appointed CEO and have great employees to support the organizations' future efforts and initiatives.  As Airbus ProSky, we think "performance" first, and are amongst the very few players to actually demonstrate a performance benefit for the end users: the airlines. The result of our efforts is starting to deliver some momentum to the ATM market. This is now recognized by the industry after several projects were successfully delivered and demonstrated significant cost savings for the airlines.

To go into some of my immediate priorities, Airbus ProSky has the challenge to expand our business based on our existing solutions. They have enormous potential and we are only at the tip of a significant market worldwide. We are working on integrating all of our subsidiaries (Metron Aviation, Quovadis and ATRiCS) to enhance the collaboration and fusion of some of the functionalities that would form the most innovative capabilities the ATM industry has to offer.
In the medium-term we want to position ourselves more as a key player of a performance oriented deployment of the future ATM systems. It is very important to increase our market share in the ATM domain because the more we know about airlines'issues with regards to ATM, the more we can provide solutions to alleviate demand vs. capacity issues and, in turn, allow more aircraft to fly. Also, other initiatives involve expanding our already robust portfolio in supporting SESAR and NextGen.

Could you briefly sum up the situation of the global ATM scenario and its evolutions from your point of view? 

ATM inefficiencies are starting to become a real threat to growth in many regions: lack of airspace and airports capacity, inefficient use of the existing capacity that leads to additional fuel cost to airlines and environmental issues for all. As an example: In January 2013, Tim Clark, the president of Emirates Airlines said that the airline "could add another 30 Airbus A380 jumbo jets to its existing order for 90 of the planes built by Airbus". However, "Part of the problem is available gate space and airspace capacity over the United Arab Emirates".

Amongst the root causes: the weak coordination between air and ground operators. Additionally, insufficient  use of the existing aircraft capabilities in the overall ATM system: most of the modern aircraft are already capable of flying very accurate routes (RNP 0,1) but this capability is scarcely used when designing an optimized the airspace structure.

There is also a lack of coordination between countries for investment and deployment. Lack of overall approach (gate to gate) of ATM issues (because of lack of coordination between the various players). Collaborative Decision Making - the joint initiative to improve airport operational efficiency through increased information exchange between key stakeholders - is the next step for ATM improvement.  
Airbus ProSky offers key solutions aimed at streamlining ATM and incorporate it into all of our solutions and how we work with our customers. Airbus ProSky has looked at where ATM is currently, and has molded itself to be the next generation of ATM. We provide the most innovative solutions that help solve these incredible capacity and demand issues, along with providing solutions that decrease fuel burn, CO2 emissions and of course, increase efficiency and safety.  

The modernisation of the ATM infrastructure is an essential objective for the future growth of air transport; what is Airbus Prosky vision of its role in support of such objective? 

It is essential. As more and more people rely on air transport to get around the globe, the ability to accommodate these people has to meet the right capacity. Whether for business or for pleasure, an average 8 million people - equivalent to the population of Switzerland - are travelling by air every day of the year. That number will continue to increase and ATM is the key to accommodating the demand, and enabling an increase in capacity.As I stated earlier, we provide amongst the most innovative solutions in the industry, ranging from ATFM, PBN and Surface Management. 

We are not only supporting modernization, but we are at the forefront of it: 

our air traffic flow management solution "Harmony" is the only commercially available and operationally-proven ATFM solution worldwide. Apart from CFMU in Europe, it is the only ATFM solution operating in numerous environments from big countries with large systems (e.g. The US FAA covering 60,000 flights a day) to smaller ones (e.g. South Africa with 3,000 flights per day). 

The Tower Surface Management System (developed by ATRiCS) is the only software on the market providing automated guidance and routing functionalities on the airport surface under any weather conditions. It helps both the pilots (who can simply follow the green lights that highlight its individual route to the gate) and the controllers who can rely on a smart touch screen HMI to achieve all main functions of guiding aircraft safely and efficiently on a busy airport.

Navigation services:

ability to tailor the procedure design or airspace structure design criteria to the aircraft capabilities (see Vagar where we had to fit the trajectories in a very challenging environment).

Robust PBN design procedures for high density TMA, taking into account a wide range of aircraft types, bringing significant benefits to the ATC and reducing controller workload.

A measurable performance model that delivers quantifiable benefits and superior value to the customer, thus supporting a premium price

In addition to these individual solutions, the added value of Airbus ProSky is to combine these capabilities, expertise and solutions with the main objective of providing "end-to-end performance improvements" to the overall air transport community and modernize ATM not in 5 years, but NOW. 

Interoperability and standardization are fundamental factors for the future ATM development and are considered as such by the main European initiatives such as SESAR; which role will Airbus Prosky play to achieve the fulfillment of these two objectives at a global level?

The SESAR programme is managed by the SESAR Joint Undertaking, a private-public partnership structure. Airbus is one of the member of the SJU and as such is significantly contributing to defining the future operational concept and related airborne technologies of the future ATM. SESAR is now close to start the initial deployment of some key operational changes: first common projects are already being set up as a pilot case, under the responsibility of SESAR JU:The SESAR JU is selecting the potential candidates for the common projects and assessing their maturity and business case. The pilot common project will probably address around 10 of the 18 essential operational changes. Airbus as well as Airbus ProSky will contribute to this key step.