Air Transport and Operations

As a quick overview, this is an brief introduction to what ATO is all about.

The section of ATO started back in 2004 with Prof. Sicco Santema and the first 7 Masters students on a 2 year MSc program called Aerospace Management and Organisation, although for many years prior to that Prof. Klaas Smit had ran a forerunner of the Chair focused on aerospace maintenance. The early AMO years were focused on developing a new an innovative educational program and indeed the intake of students tripled in as many years. Prof. Curran joined from Queens University Belfast in August 2008 and took over as Section Chair with a view to developing the strong air transport focus and our international research relevance. Subsequently, in 2009 we removed the less technical pure management, business and entrepreneurship elements from the core academic content in order to focus on the operations modelling, optimisation and validation of the applied technical challenges within air transport, renaming ourselves more precisely as Air Transport and Operations (ATO).

The permanent core ATO staff more than doubled in 2010 to deal with the continued student growth and 2 new ATO MSc Profiles were developed (out of the 13 Profiles offered by the Faculty to circa 230 new MSc students each year). The Profiles are entitled: ‘Air Transport and Aerospace Operations'  and ‘Air Traffic Management and Airports', with the first being more focused on airlines and the latter being shared with the Control and Simulation Section. Our MSc student numbers have now stabilised at an intake of circa 40 per year and our focus is now on depth, quality and impact rather than growth.

Anyone familiar with the challenges expressed by SESAR and ACARE 2020 Vision in Europe and NextGen in the US will understand something of the motivation for the impact that ATO can make both in education and research. Our aim is to be recognised as one of the top five centres of excellence in the world in air transport and to play a significant role in understanding, modelling and improving air transport performance in capacity, cost effectiveness, environmental impact and safety.

Finally, please also check out our annual Air Transport and Operations Symposium (ATOS) and international Journal of Aerospace Operations (JASO).