The Top 5 Areas Most Investors, Startups, and Companies Don’t Understand About Air Traffic Management (ATM) - Part 2
This is the second article in a two-part series from The Aspect Group on what investors, startups, and companies most consistently get wrong about air traffic management.
In Part 1, Tom White, Lorne Cass, and Mark Hopkins discussed why new entrants cannot assume the airspace will accommodate them, and why operational reality always overrides a perfect schedule.
In Part 2, the conversation turns to time variability, data collaboration, public acceptance, and the strategic distinction between ATM and ATC.
3. Stop Talking About Efficiency. Start Talking About Time.
ATM is fundamentally the management of uncertainty in time and space. Efficiency, capacity, emissions reduction, and financial benefits are all downstream outcomes of reducing variance across the aviation system. The first thing Mark wanted to put on the table had nothing to do with drones or eVTOLs specifically — it had to do with the language most operators use when they talk about what they are trying to accomplish.
Mark Hopkins: Before there is a discussion of efficiency, optimization, or emissions — talk about time. It starts with time. If you're looking at time, you gain efficiency, you gain optimization. It rarely if ever starts there.
There are, by Mark's count, at least seven different ETAs inside the FAA system at any given moment — some submitted by airlines, others generated by ATC itself. ATM decisions are fundamentally built around predicting when aircraft will arrive at specific points in space. When those time references disagree, every downstream decision becomes harder, and uncertainty propagates throughout the system.
Mark Hopkins: Airlines schedules are built on historical data, which means the city pair times are built using means or averages, in conjunction with standard deviations. If you can reduce standard deviation in a city-pair time by even one or one and a half minutes, you're creating internal and system-wide benefits.
Mark Hopkins: Aircraft get to points in space at variable times. There's not 100% certainty that an aircraft is going to be at top of descent at any very specific time. It could be variable. And minutes make a difference. One or two minutes make a difference. ATM has to constantly address those variations tactically.
The implication for new entrants is direct: if your business pitch centers on how clean or quiet or automated your vehicle is, but you have not thought hard about how your customer's operations interact with time variance in the NAS, you are missing the core problem that ATM is trying to solve.
4. Collaboration and the Importance of Accurate Information
Lorne Cass: The accuracy of the information you submit as an operator is critical. It is the old garbage in, garbage out issue.
Tom White: It is not only accuracy, but frequency. When we did metering at JFK, some operators would update their estimated off-block time. Others would not update anything. So we were making decisions based on information that was wrong, and it adversely affected the entire surface management plan.
Mark explained why operators often do not share accurate data, even when sharing it would benefit everyone.
Mark Hopkins: If an operator does not recognize a benefit, internally or systemically, from providing data in real time — they likely won't allocate the resources to provide it. There is potentially greater benefit in identifying and extracting the relevant data elements in support of developing the correct tool sets for the NAS that facilitates the operation for all users.
He then used the SMART program as a real-world example of what happens when this problem is not addressed at the design stage.
Mark Hopkins: There's a program being developed called SMART. It's fundamentally flawed from the start. The developers are not getting any data or operational insight from any operators — no input from anyone who schedules or flies any type of aircraft, including UAS. To build a program like that, you need data from every operator who is out there or planning to operate in the NAS. Airlines, UAS, AAM, all of them.
Lorne Cass: I saw a presentation about how the new BNATCS/SMART initiative might work — how you could be looking at all arrivals into San Francisco six months out. That's great, except all of that data is about scheduled airline arrivals. It has nothing to do with a business jet flying in or general aviation. There's no real appreciation for how many unscheduled operations are in the airspace.
For any company building systems that depend on the NAS, the takeaway is clear: plan from the beginning to provide accurate, frequent data. And plan for a world where not everyone else is doing the same.
5. The Public Has a Vote. So Does the Hill.
The final area was one that often does not appear in investor decks at all.
Tom White: What does the public want and what is it going to tolerate? People may not be interested in having pizzas dropped off in my front yard and having 30 drones fly up and down their street every day. The general public may or may not be on board with the direction that a company sees as a business model.
Lorne Cass: I was in a meeting a few years ago where a representative from a noise advocacy group told a new operator who said 'we're not noisy' exactly this: 'If I can see you, I can hear you.' And then she said: 'You are going to have to deal with me whether you like it or not.'
Jim Barry added a parallel point: an FAA Administrator once told him that one person in Boston complaining about noise can hold up NextGen. The political and community opposition to infrastructure changes — even highly beneficial ones — is not a minor risk. It is one of the most reliable patterns in aviation history.
Tom White: This is not pessimism. It is pattern recognition. The companies that have moved furthest in operational deployment are the ones that invested early in public education, community engagement, and regulatory relationships — not as a compliance obligation, but as a genuine part of the business model.
The Definitions That Matter: ATM vs. ATC
One last point that came up during the conversation is worth clarifying for readers newer to aviation.
ATM — Air Traffic Management is strategic, operating on a planning horizon of one to eight hours. Its job is to look at demand across a region, identify where capacity problems are likely to develop, and take action early enough that controllers are not overwhelmed.
ATC — Air Traffic Control is tactical. It is the real-time execution layer. Its job is to manage separation over the coming minutes, issue clearances, and respond to what is happening right now.
Tom White: ATM provides ATC with a manageable environment to work in. And there has to be a consistent feedback loop between strategic and tactical to be effective.
For new entrants, this distinction matters because the two systems have different data needs, different decision timeframes, and different points of failure. A technology that addresses one without accounting for the other is only addressing half the problem.
A Final Thought
Tom White: I'd like to emphasize one more time the potential for minimizing the types of operating rule sets and homogenizing the fleet to operate under a single set of rules. I think that is a good way to reduce complexity and allow people to have reliable access to the NAS. And that requires compatible technologies on board and technologies on the ATM and UTM side of things.
The companies that will succeed in this space are not just the ones with the best equipped vehicles. They are the ones that understand the system they are entering, its history, its constraints, its data needs, and its human realities, and then build accordingly.
