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New Airservices Australia interim CEO Rob Sharp has indicated a continuing focus on innovation at the air traffic management body.
Speaking at the inaugural 2024 Australian Aviation Summit, Sharp said the sector is “at a really critical time for the future of aviation” and pointed to air traffic management as “the third leg of the stool” alongside airlines and airports.
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“The way we think about airspace is evolving as we get more and more demands from organisations wanting to use airspace. We need to adapt for the future in a way that’s safe but also sustainable and balances the needs for all users,” he said.
Sharp pointed to a trial of user-preferred routing on 38 scheduled routes, as well as the Flight Information Management System (FIMS) to manage drone traffic; digital aerodrome services, which will launch next year at Canberra Airport and be integrated into Western Sydney International Airport when it opens in 2026; and the OneSKY-CMATS program to unify civil and military air traffic management across Australia, as being major innovation initiatives at Airservices.
“Embracing innovation means forgoing the old ways of doing things and current technology that’s been in place for many years. New capabilities come packaged with new demands, and we’re going to have to step up to that space,” he said.
“The future of air traffic management is going to require the efforts of everyone in the industry to invest in the best technologies, enabling the ideas that come through from the industry so we can be at the forefront of global aviation in this space.
“What I want to do is call for closer, ongoing collaboration across the whole aviation sector, so that we can actually develop an ecosystem that is fit for purpose, enables us to capture those exciting opportunities that are coming, but also enables us to secure the social license we’re going to need as an industry to expand and grow our capacity and to address those community and societal changes that are very much on the agenda at the moment.”
Sharp, who left Virgin in 2019 as part of a management restructure, was CEO of Tigerair for four years before becoming Virgin’s group executive for airlines. After Virgin, he served as secretary of Transport for NSW from 2021–23 and is now serving a 12-month term at Airservices after being appointed as interim CEO in July.
The search for a new Airservices CEO comes after Jason Harfield stepped down in June following an eight-year tenure, having reached the end of his contract.
