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Europe’s flagship air traffic modernisation programme, SESAR, is entering a decisive new phase as fresh EU and industry funding accelerates work on a fully digital, greener and more resilient European sky.
What Continued EU Funding Means for SESAR
The SESAR 3 Joint Undertaking, the latest phase of the Single European Sky ATM Research partnership, is backed by a robust multi-year funding model that underlines Brussels’ long-term commitment to overhauling air traffic management. The initiative is co-financed through the EU’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme and by industry partners including Eurocontrol and major aviation stakeholders. The current framework foresees 600 million euro from Horizon Europe, up to 500 million euro in contributions from Eurocontrol, and at least 500 million euro from industry, creating a funding envelope in excess of 1.6 billion euro when combined with earlier SESAR waves.
On top of this core budget, SESAR’s Digital European Sky programme is drawing on at least 200 million euro from the EU’s Connecting Europe Facility for large-scale demonstrations. These demonstrators move promising concepts from the lab into real operations, a critical step in reducing delays, unlocking new capacity and cutting emissions in Europe’s congested skies. Taken together, this mix of research and deployment funding marks one of the most sustained investments anywhere in the world in next-generation air traffic management.
Recent announcements highlight how that money is now being put to work. In February 2026, SESAR selected 42 new research and innovation projects under the Digital European Sky umbrella, representing around 350 million euro of combined EU and industry investment. Those projects constitute an early implementation wave of the European ATM Master Plan adopted in late 2024, the official roadmap guiding Europe’s transformation towards a fully digital and scalable air traffic system by the mid-2040s.
The Vision: A Digital European Sky by 2045
The overarching objective of SESAR’s latest phase is the creation of a Digital European Sky, a concept that extends far beyond incremental software upgrades in control centres. The vision is for a seamless, data-driven system in which crewed commercial aircraft, drones, advanced air mobility vehicles and state aviation all share the same airspace through high levels of automation, connectivity and harmonised procedures. Digital platforms would replace today’s fragmented national systems, enabling capacity to scale with demand while maintaining stringent safety margins.
The European ATM Master Plan 2025 sets ambitious climate and efficiency milestones for this transformation. By 2035 European air traffic management is expected to enable a reduction of around 100 million tonnes of CO₂ compared with a business-as-usual trajectory, rising to roughly 200 million tonnes by 2040. Those gains are to be achieved through more direct routings, smarter use of airspace, reduced holding patterns and better integration of weather data into flight planning and control. At the same time, the system is being redesigned to cope with a forecast increase to about 16 million flights annually by 2050, even as new types of aircraft add complexity.
For travellers, the Digital European Sky is intended to translate into fewer delays, smoother connections and more predictable journeys across borders. For airlines and airports, it promises lower operating costs and more efficient use of runway and airspace capacity. For policymakers, the programme is also a lever to safeguard European technological sovereignty in critical infrastructure as competition intensifies from North America and Asia in air traffic systems and satellite-based services.
Key Projects Now Shaping Tomorrow’s Airspace
The newest batch of SESAR-funded projects illustrates the breadth of the transformation underway. Among the 42 initiatives selected in 2026 are efforts to embed trustworthy artificial intelligence in air traffic and airport operations, improve trajectory prediction, and strengthen cyber resilience across increasingly virtualised, cloud-based air traffic systems. One project, focused on AI compliance for air traffic management, is developing tools to ensure algorithms meet the EU’s emerging regulatory requirements for transparency and safety in critical infrastructure.
Large-scale demonstrators are testing how these innovations perform in real operations. The AMEA demonstrator, awarded almost 27 million euro in Connecting Europe Facility support in 2025, is trialling next-generation air-to-ground communication technologies in European airspace. By integrating satellite and terrestrial data links, AMEA aims to boost the resilience and capacity of communications that underpin every flight clearance, routing change and safety alert. Results from such trials are expected to inform future Europe-wide deployment decisions.
Other SESAR-backed initiatives, such as the Flight Centric ATC project, are experimenting with more flexible ways of organising control sectors. Instead of the traditional rigid, geography-based model, controllers manage flows of flights across wider areas using advanced tools and new human-machine interfaces. Early simulations have shown that this approach could help Europe handle higher traffic volumes without proportionally increasing staffing, while maintaining safety margins even in degraded scenarios such as severe weather or system failures.
Why This Matters for Travellers and Airlines
For passengers, SESAR’s continued funding is not an abstract Brussels policy story but a driver of concrete changes likely to shape European flying over the next decade. As traffic in many regions returns to and surpasses pre-pandemic levels, Europe’s patchwork of national control systems is being strained, leading to delays, reroutings and higher fuel burn. SESAR’s work to harmonise procedures and digital platforms is designed to reduce those frictions, making cross-border flights smoother and more predictable, particularly in busy airspace over hubs such as London, Paris, Frankfurt and Amsterdam.
Improved efficiency in the skies also supports airlines’ climate strategies. While sustainable aviation fuels and new aircraft designs attract much of the public attention, operational improvements guided by SESAR can yield immediate emissions savings at relatively low cost. More accurate trajectories, dynamic use of cruising altitudes and real-time weather optimisation can help carriers cut fuel use per flight, supporting both corporate sustainability targets and EU climate objectives.
From a competitive standpoint, a modernised European air traffic system should also make the region more attractive for new mobility services, from urban air taxis to cross-border drone logistics. By embedding common standards and digital interfaces into the Digital European Sky from the outset, SESAR aims to avoid today’s national fragmentation repeating itself in the next wave of aviation technologies.
Next Steps on Europe’s Aviation Roadmap
With the latest funding decisions, SESAR is shifting from concept development to accelerated deployment planning. The coming years will see a tighter linkage between research outputs, real-world demonstrations and regulatory frameworks at EU level. Events such as Airspace World 2025 in Lisbon, where SESAR showcased progress on the Digital European Sky alongside other European aviation bodies, underline the programme’s role as a convening platform for airlines, air navigation service providers, manufacturers and airports.
Political support remains crucial. Continued EU backing through Horizon Europe, the Connecting Europe Facility and potential follow-on instruments will determine how quickly Europe can move from pilot projects to network-wide implementation. With air traffic volumes projected to keep rising and climate pressures intensifying, the decisions taken in this decade on SESAR funding and governance will largely define how Europeans fly in the 2030s and 2040s.
For now, the signal from Brussels is clear: modernising air traffic management is a strategic priority, and SESAR’s expanded budget and project portfolio are central to that effort. As the Digital European Sky vision moves from policy papers into control towers, cockpits and eventually autonomous flight operations, travellers across the continent are set to feel the impact every time they look up at Europe’s increasingly connected skies.