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Feasibility of a new air traffic management concept is examined which might increase the efficiency of en-route operations by up to 100%. The concept follows the idea of a sector-less airspace organization. Aircraft entering the airspace (e.g. the German airspace or the entire European Airspace) will be assigned to one controller who is in charge of controlling the aircraft from entry point (or TMA exit point) to exit point of the airspace (or TMA entry point). First simple real time simulations revealed very promising results. The concept seems to enable an easy transition into a user preferred trajectory (direct-to) operations whilst at the same time increasing ATCO's efficiency and airspace capacity.

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Extending previous works by Doehler and Bollmeyer we describe a new implementation of an imaging radar simulator. Our approach is based on using modern computer graphics hardware making heavy use of recent technologies like vertex and fragment shaders. Furthermore, to allow for a nearly realistic image we generate radar shadows implementing shadow map techniques in the programmable graphics hardware. The particular implementation is tailored to imitate millimeter wave (MMW) radar but could be extended for other types of radar systems easily.

In sectorless air traffic management the airspace is considered as one piece instead of partitioning it into sectors. The air traffic controllers are no longer in charge of sectors but are given responsibility for a certain number of aircraft during their entire flight. This entails that the controller has to keep track of several different traffic situations geographically spread out over a potentially large area. Of course, such a considerable change of concept has implications on the controllers' mental model and the way conflicts are solved. This paper describes the shift of the controller's mental model away from one geographically limited view with long-term planning to several global views with short-term planning. It is illustrated how this altered mental model also implies changes of the controller's tasks and conflict solving. Real-time simulations within DLR's LRM2020 project have shown that working with a sectorless concept is possible and feasible if the co ntroller is supported by suitable conflict detection. The details and results of these simulations are given and the effects of the altered mental model are analyzed. It is furthermore explained how a sectorless concept could change controller work away from controller teams consisting of executive and planner to a one-person workplace supported by a conflict detection. At the same time the principle that two pairs of eyes are better than one is retained. The controller's tasks are not reduced to monitoring jobs but the essential conflict avoidance task remains