Participants walked close to 10,000 steps across the exhibition floor at Airspace World 2026 as part of a series of guided SESAR tours showcasing how Europe’s air traffic management innovation is moving towards deployment. Organised by the SESAR Joint Undertaking and the SESAR Deployment Manager, brought together projects and partners from across Europe’s air traffic management ecosystem to explore how innovation is moving towards deployment. Participants followed demonstrations and expert insights across the exhibition floor, tracing the journey of key SESAR Solutions that support the evolution set out in the European ATM Master Plan.
Covering a wide range of themes from trajectory-based operations, sustainability and U-space, to virtualisation and enabling technologies, the tours highlighted how collaborative work between industry and operational stakeholders is turning research into operational capability. Participants covered close to 10,000 steps while engaging directly with the people, technologies and solutions driving a more connected, efficient and resilient ATM system.
Trajectory-based operations in action across Europe
Trajectory-based operations (TBO) is a cornerstone of the future European ATM system, enabling aircraft trajectories to be shared, updated and managed collaboratively at every phase of a flight. Many of the building blocks for TBO were presented across two dedicated walking tours, illustrating progress from research to deployment.
Read the full walking tours news report.
EU Green Deal in action: advancing sustainability in ATM
How can air traffic management support aviation in meeting Europe’s climate ambitions? The walking tour showcased how SESAR research is helping to minimise aviation’s environmental footprint through smarter and more sustainable flight operations. Participants explored a series of demonstrations highlighting innovations in optimised descents, arrival management, trajectory optimisation, wake energy retrieval and contrail mitigation.
Read the full walking tour news report.
U-space in action: building and integrating Europe’s drone ecosystem
The safe and scalable integration of drones into European airspace is one of the most pressing challenges facing aviation today. As operations increase across sectors—from logistics to emergency response—ensuring coordination between crewed and uncrewed traffic becomes critical. Two dedicated walking tours showcased how these solutions are progressing from validation to real-world implementation, addressing both integration with ATM and the development of safe, trusted drone operations.
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Smarter airspace: civil–military integration and digital coordination
European airspace is becoming increasingly dynamic, requiring tighter coordination between civil and military operations and more agile, data-driven airspace management. The tour explored elements such as dynamic airspace configuration, real-time civil–military collaboration, and the use of dual-use digital technologies to support safe, efficient and flexible operations.
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Can Europe’s airspace keep up? Smarter ways to manage demand and capacity
Managing growing air traffic demand while maintaining safe, efficient and predictable operations remains one of the central challenges for European air traffic management. The tour presented solutions enabling a more data-driven, collaborative and dynamic approach to capacity management, combining local optimisation with network-wide coordination.
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CNS: the digital backbone of air traffic management
Reliable communications, navigation and surveillance (CNS) systems are the digital backbone of modern air traffic management. Through demonstrations, simulations and validation results, the tour highlighted how these technologies enable more connected, resilient and interoperable ATM systems, paving the way for the deployment of CNS capabilities across Europe’s airspace.
Read the full walking tour news report.
Building a more connected and digital air traffic management system
Europe’s air traffic management system is progressively moving towards a more digital, service-oriented ecosystem, where air traffic services can be delivered more flexibly across locations and organisational boundaries. Virtualisation technologies, system-wide information management (SWIM) services and advanced airspace management tools are central to this transformation and are also laying the foundations for future implementation - developments which were explored during the tour.
Read the full walking tour news report.
Enabling digital air-ground connectivity for new airspace operations
Air-ground connectivity is a critical enabler of the future digital air traffic management system, supporting richer information exchange, more resilient communications and the integration of new types of airspace users, including operations in higher airspace. A key building block of the European ATM Master Plan, air-ground connectivity was explored during this walking tour.
Read the full walking tour news report.
On-board automation: towards the intelligent cockpit
From AI-powered digital assistants to concepts enabling single-pilot operations, the next generation of on-board automation is transforming how pilots and controllers interact with intelligent systems. Through a series of demonstrations and validation results, the tour showcased how SESAR research is shaping future human–machine collaboration both in the cockpit and in air traffic control.
Read the full walking tour news report.
Airport operations – the intelligent airport
Airports are becoming increasingly smart, connected and data-driven, with AI and advanced decision-support tools reshaping how operations are managed across the ecosystem. Developments such as these were explored in this tour, notably how SESAR is improving punctuality, optimising capacity and enhancing the efficiency and safety of airport operations from surface movements to network coordination.