The Market for ATC Simulators and Training Devices

The civil ATC simulator and training device market is undergoing major changes. The growth of air traffic in the Far East, Middle East and Latin America along with an ageing population of controllers in North America and Europe are two major high level market drivers. At the same time the corporatisation of training services and new ATC technologies providing both low-cost and, at the high-end, advanced processing and visualisation capabilities are also impacting the market.

Based on comments from suppliers and industry bodies, the next five years will see accelerated demand for global controller recruitment but because of government spending squeezes in north America and Europe – which may be partly eased through financing training device purchases through leasing and other financial instruments – simulator sales are likely to remain generally flat, though increased number of tower systems are likely in the Middle East and Asia, especially China and India. The spare capacity in European and US training schools could be partly made up by new business from Asia and Latin America. With China currently building 50 airports as part of the current five year development plan this is likely to be the single largest element of market growth over the next three years.

This study has been compiled from both high level – assessing regional demands for air travel – and low level - tracking contracts of simulator sales – research.  Various assumptions on value have been made, based on published contract information. However, simulator systems are highly customised and by no means all simulator sales are published in the public domain; these assumptions should be treated with caution. Conservative estimates have therefore been applied.

This does not include simulator systems used for airspace modelling and research or systems developed by industry to training experienced controllers on new equipment.

An update to this study will be published within the next 12 months.

This report is sponsored by:

Around the world around 3,500 new controllers begin training every year while many thousand more undergo on-the-job training and customised course work. Appendix one outlines an IFATCA census of global controller staff numbers. Each five-year training course for ab initio training costs around $600,000, suggesting the global controller training market for new entrant controllers is worth annually around $437.5 million. Follow-on training and new equipment training will probably add a further $150 million to the overall market value

There is a direct link between the number of flights and the number of controllers required to manage flights (see table one below).

Table one: ICAO scheduled passenger traffic forecast for 2011-2013

Passenger-kilometres performed are expressed in billions and growth in per cent

Source: ICAO

Around one-third of all controllers are based in the USA. Between 1,100-1,900 new recruits graduate from FAA-licensed training establishments in the USA. It is however extremely difficult to be accurate in calculating exact figures given the relatively high fall-out rate and the volatile peaks and troughs of demand within an ageing workforce in Europe and North America.

The USA and Europe remain the two largest segments of the market, but training requirements are rising rapidly in the Far East, the Middle East and Latin America. Dubai has recently recruited 100 controllers and engineers to cater for its new hub airport developments. Increasingly these countries are developing national and regional training centres.  China, which has traditionally trained many of its controllers in the USA, is now building national training facilities in new en-route centres.

In the USA training takes place in the FAA’s own training centres, in academic institutions and in dedicated privately-owned training schools such as the Pan Am Academy, Miami, which trains controllers from around the world. By 2016, the FAA expects to employ 16,000 controllers. It has recently expanded its FAA Collegiate Training Initiative (CTI) which implemented in 1990 to help recruit and train prospective ATC specialists, to cope with the problem of an ageing controller population. The FAA has partnerships with many colleges and universities where schools offer two- and four-year non-engineering aviation degrees that teach basic courses in air traffic control.

More than 15,000 federal air traffic controllers are employed in airport traffic control towers, terminal radar approach control facilities. An additional 1,289 civilian contract controllers and more than 9,500 military controllers also provide air traffic services for the NAS. The FAA controller workforce plan can be found at http://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staffing/media/CWP_2011.pdf.

But a recent report from the US Office of Inspector General states: “With so many veteran controllers leaving, FAA faces the risk of not having enough certified professional controllers to operate its busiest and most complex air traffic control facilities.” While the FAA has boosted training in recent years to address the issue, new recruits are not qualifying to work at the critical facilities.  “Critical facilities also lost 40% of their trainees to attrition, compared to the national average of 24%," it said. In the New York radar control area 77% of controllers who completed training from the fiscal year 2008 to 2010 did not become certified controllers. In Los Angeles, of the 200 controllers who entered on-the-job training only 58 became certified by 2011.

Simulator sales throughout the USA in recent years have therefore been boosted by short-term requirements to increase controller throughput and by the FAA to licence more academic training centres.

In Europe, there is a consolidation process of training establishments underway as part of the functional airspace block (FAB) requirement and the market is also opening up increasingly to competition as international training centres seek customers from throughout the continent and beyond. There is also a growing demand to provide simulator systems to individual airports for customised training there, and a growing number of private organisations undertaking training courses which until now have been run by state-run institutions. For example, as part of the 2010 “Royal Decree” in Spain the new regulation opened up provision of tower services and controller training through a concession scheme to certified providers.

However, the decline in air traffic in Europe (estimated by EUROCONTROL in 2012 to be between 1.3% and 1.7% lower in 2012 than in 2011) plus the economic crisis in the Eurozone is starting to negatively impact the ATC simulator market in the continent,

In contrast the Middle East is rapidly developing training capabilities to cope with increased traffic loads, especially at the new hub airports, but training schools in Latin America and Africa have not developed to meet air traffic growth in the areas and air navigation service providers (ANSPs) there rely on many external partners to provide training capabilities.

Training establishments vary in size from single classrooms in an operational unit supplied with one or two desk-top PCs to massive training centres like the FAA’s Oklahoma training centre or Sweden’s Entry Point North academy which is equipped with more than 180 simulator positions, two 360° tower simulators and eleven 180° tower simulators – all with high resolution 3D image generation.

The training market is one in which the roles of industry systems suppliers and ANSPs are becoming increasingly blurred, in which manufacturers of training aids are developing courses and ANSPs are developing new training aids.

Examples of this include:

• The FAA’s award to Raytheon of a 10-year $437 million contract to support initial training at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City and to support ongoing training in air traffic facilities nationwide.
• L-3 Communications runs the Link Simulation & Training Air Traffic Control Academy at North Texas Regional Airport and Telephonics has opened a Training and Integration Center in New York.
• Airservices Australia has developed a computer-based ATC training simulator (PC Sim), now operating in Papua New Guinea.
• The 360° Total Control Simulator in use at South Africa's Air Traffic and Navigation Services (ATNS) has been developed by Airways New Zealand. Training system manufacturer Tern Systems was established in 1997 by the Systems Engineering Laboratory of the University of Iceland and the Icelandic Civil Aviation Administration.
• The Indonesian Ministry of Transportation and Boeing have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to jointly work to establish advanced aviation training programs, focusing on the development of an advanced aviation training center to align air traffic controller (ATC) training programs to standards and equipment deployed throughout Indonesia.

The establishment of the Entry-Point-North controller training school between LFV, Naviair and Avinor has decreased the cost per-student per-week by 17% between 2007 and 2009 and increased productivity by an astonishing 85%, according to Morten Dambaek, Director General of Naviair.  The Functional Airspace Block Europe Central (FABEC) has agreed to cooperate on basic controller training. The common FABEC training network – including all current FABEC training entities (ENAC, Belgocontrol, DFS, LVNL and Skyguide) will provide joint ATCO basic training to meet their own needs and FABEC partners. The agreement covers content and quality and includes a FABEC common basic course that will enable flexible allocation of trainers within the region. The FABEC area covers 55 per cent of all European air traffic and the FABEC service providers employ a total of 17,700 people of which 5,400 are controllers.

Alongside the trend to consolidate training within multi-national regional centres cost pressures are also encouraging greater competition for global business from national training establishments. The market is being driven by requirements for new controllers within fast-growing aviation areas of the world such as China, India, the Middle East and Latin America, along with an urgent requirement for younger recruits in North America and Europe. Key recent consolidation and international business activities by national ATM organisations include:

• At the end of June 2012 DFS Deutsche Flugsicherung and the Air Traffic Management Bureau (ATMB) of Civil Aviation Administration of China agreed to intensify their cooperation in areas such as training.
• HungaroControl and Entry Point North, the shared training centre of the Swedish, Danish and Norwegian air navigation services, opened a joint air navigation service academy in 2011 with the denomination Entry Point Central (EPC).
• EUROCONTROL’s Luxembourg  Institute of Air Navigation Services In 2011 delivered training courses to almost 3500 participants from Europe.
• East African School of Aviation of Nairobi is growing business from neighbouring African states.
• Airways New Zealand, has secured a multi- million dollar contract to provide English language and air traffic control (ATC) training in New Zealand for the General Authority of Civil Aviation (GACA) of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
• Nordic training academy Entry Point North has joined with LFV Aviation Consulting to expand the training services on offer. The partnership will provide training and consultancy services to students from growing markets in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
• Entry Point North training has also been selected to train controllers at Prishtina International Airport in Kosovo for the next three years.
• NAV Portugal has signed a letter of intent with Central-Southern Regional ATMB CAAC, specifically concerning training in the operational safety area.
• Air Services Australia through the government-funded Indonesia Transport Safety Assistance Package (ITSAP) is assisting Papua New Guinea in ATC training courses.
• Italy’s ENAV Forlì Academy Training Centre has trained controllers from the Ukrainian State Air Traffic Service Enterprise (UkSATSE). ENAV already provides training support for foreign providers in China, Malaysia, Egypt, Germany, Poland and Turkey.  A memorandum of understanding was signed by the Director General of Libya’s CAA, Abdulrazag M. Zatout and ENAV CEO Massimo Garbini in early December 2011 to allow for the provision of training courses and the development of air navigation assistance services, including the training of 180 controllers.

In the future there will be further business opportunities for ANSP training establishments to generate revenues from military controller training initiatives. Airservices Australia and the Royal Australian Air Force are implementing a joint air traffic management system which includes a training component. This is likely to be followed elsewhere in the world as defence departments look for areas of savings.

With such a high degree of customisation it is extremely difficult to be precise about the global value of simulator technologies, which can vary from PC based systems costing less than $1,000 to 360-degree 3D tower simulator with advanced visualisation systems costing around $2.4 million, though this figure is entirely dependent on the number of controller positions specified and the complexity of the visualisation system and degree of integration with other training units.

There has been a marked slow-down in simulator sales within Europe over the last 18 months or so and the market in the Middle East, Latin America and Asia is relatively buoyant. The market in Africa is still largely dictated by the availability of development funding, with the exception of South Africa.

Individual simulator sales announced in the public domain are relatively few (see table below), and reflect only a fraction of the overall market. Many sales are as sub -contracts – for example, many Thales ATC centre awards include Micro Nav training components.   A more generic market assessment suggests the global market (in terms of new contact awards), is running at around $30-$35 million a year, though considerably more (possibly double) when military contracts, airspace simulation and upgrade/software improvement contracts are added.

Table two: declared civil ATC training simulator sales 

The ATC civil simulator market covers the following products

• Computer based training classrooms
• Radar simulators  with single or multiple controller positions, with weather and aeronautical information/ATFN displays
• Flight data  processing positions
• Voice recognition and pseudo-pilot positions
• High resolution visual systems
• Communications equipment, with touchscreen interphone and radio systems
• 3-D tower simulators – varying from a single LCD screen to a large 360° view using multiple projectors in an integrated network of controller students working with pseudo-pilots. New visualisation systems can support screen resolutions up to 2,560 pixels × 1,650 pixels with 32-bit colour depth and capable of handling over 250 moving objects

These can be provided as stand-alone systems or embedded in active ATC systems and options include enhanced recording/replay function with an evaluation tool to assess student performance. Not included in this survey are devices sued for airspace modelling and scenario simulations.

From being a student to become a fully qualified controller can take around five years. A 30% reduction in the length of the training process – suggested by NASA Ames as a potential saving as a result of employing new simulator systems - would save considerable training costs and bring the new controllers on line much faster. Even after qualification the requirements for training do not end -  it can takes around six months to train a controller with 10 years’ experience on a new sector.

Staff generally account for around 60 per cent of all ANSP costs, of which controllers account for at least half the total.

It takes several years to train a controller, and costs on average €600,000 according to the European Performance Review Commission (PRC). A disappointing 40-60% fail to complete the process. Employing new, more effective simulation technologies earlier in the initial application process alongside more careful aptitude tests can significantly decrease the number of fall-out candidates, believe many in the industry.

The emergence of more powerful processors, speech recognition software and more realistic visualisation systems is changing the capabilities of simulators to provide increasingly realistic training scenarios. The potential is to improve throughput times and lower training costs – though the integration of these new devices with the curriculum needs to be constantly reassessed to optimise their potential. The use of new speech recognition software for example decreases the number of human “psuedo-pilots” required to run realistic training scenarios.

According to Telephonics Corporation “Air traffic controllers will require training to operate the tools and functions that will be available due to the new ADS-B-enabled equipment.  They will also need to learn the new air traffic control procedures and communications protocols with pilots… simulation training allows for smoother and faster adoption of new air traffic management technologies while delivering higher throughput rates than traditional classroom training due to a unique learning model that tailors itself based on skill level and experience..  As new controllers learn their skills on the new technology, the current generation of controllers will also need conversion training to new systems and procedures.”

The FAA is deploying simulators which “re-create an airport’s layout and allows controller trainees to practice landing, take off and manoeuvring around the airfield using ADS-B technology.  While almost 200 scenarios are already built into the system, the simulator can also be programmed with scenarios that re-create conditions that have been linked to major accidents in the past,” said Telephonics.  “Such advances in simulation technologies as visual simulation, speech recognition and replicating 4D trajectory analysis technology are helping to make simulation training even more compelling.  Software is used to generate traffic, flight plan information and weather information. This data is then passed to actual air traffic control system displays, which enable training on an actual real world system, but with simulated data.  This type of simulation training means trainees experience real-life scenarios on the same equipment they will use once they become certified air traffic controllers.” 

COTS technology is driving the requirement for fewer hardware elements, reduced support costs and increasing customised flexibility to allow training organisations to use a single system for different training scenarios, changing field of views, resolution and display orientation. 

The increases in the capability of COTS hardware continues to make simulators more affordable and powerful. This has led to users who historically would not have considered purchasing a simulator for training to do so. This is particularly true for 3D tower simulators. The evolution of the COTS multi-media market is expected to continue this process.

While the market is vibrant the research and development costs required to develop new processing, visualisation and voice-recognition simulation technologies to market is extremely high and number of outlets – ATC, defence, medical services – relatively low.  Manufacturers will have to rely increasingly on developing software-based low-cost, COTS-based products to the growing number of new-entrants while developing high-send systems to, in the main, government-based organisations.

North America and Europe account for 80% of the global market – by unit numbers – and slightly more by value of the total civil ATC simulator and training device market. This is not surprising given the number of colleges in these areas of the world training controllers from other parts of the world.

New centres are being planned and implemented in China, India and Middle East, for the most part concentrated on providing controllers for domestic requirements.

The major ATC simulator and training device manufacturing organisations comprise:

Table three: ATC simulators in use around the world

Source: data is supplied by manufacturers and individual research. Please note, due to commercial confidentiality issues this is a work in progress and will be updated when new information becomes available. Please consult the editor if more accurate or timely data is available. 

Industry, technology and regulatory factors impacting the market

According to Indra: “The future of the ATC Simulation market will be linked to the ATC control systems market (for each ATC control centre, the client will ask for a new training simulation chain). Another market driver will be the expected expansion of ATC training centres due to the liberalization of air transportation services and the privatization of the ATC industry.”

With a shortfall in pertinent manpower skills in the industry predicted over the next 20 years, the demand for cost-effective training solutions will continue to grow at an accelerated pace. Providing controlled access for multiple teams, reducing time spent on training and treating simulation as an extension of classroom and on the job training, and integrating simulation into the