sustainability Article Towards Sustainability in Air Traffic Management Utku Kale 1, * , István Jankovics 1 , András Nagy 2 and Dániel Rohács 1   Citation: Kale, U.; Jankovics, I.; Nagy, A.; Rohács, D. Towards Sustainability in Air Traffic Management. Sustainability 2021, 13, 5451. https://doi.org/10.3390/ su13105451 Academic Editor: Lynnette Dray Received: 9 April 2021 Accepted: 10 May 2021 Published: 13 May 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). 1 Department of Aeronautics, and Naval Architecture, Faculty of Transportation Engineering and Vehicle Engineering, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, 1111 Budapest, Hungary; ijankovics@vrht.bme.hu (I.J.); drohacs@vrht.bme.hu (D.R.) 2 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Institute of Engineering, University of Dunaújváros, 2400 Dunaújváros, Hungary; nagy.andras@uniduna.hu * Correspondence: ukale@vrht.bme.hu; Tel.: +36-1463-1916 Abstract: The International Civil Aviation Organization is estimated that the number of domestic and international passengers will be expected to reach six billion by 2030. This exponential growth in air transport has resulted in a wide range of adverse effects such as environmental impacts. The purpose of this research is to develop new air traffic management, and operator (pilots, air traffic controllers) load measuring systems in order to save fuel, and flight time, thereby reducing environmental impact, carbon emission, greenhouse gas generation, noise pollution, and operating cost. This paper deals with: (i) dynamic sectorization and airspace configuration (ii) introduction of the highly dynamic approach and landing procedures, (iii) dilemmas of human in sustainability (related to the individuals, the society, the non-governmental organizations, and the managers), and (iv) development of dedicated non-intrusive operator supporting systems based on eye-tracking, heart rate, and electrodermal activity. Due to the consequent effects of these developments, the dynamic sectorization and air space configuration may eliminate the task overload and reduce the actual operator load by 30–40%. With the developed concept of dynamic approach and landing procedures, aircraft will be able to follow better trajectories to avoid residential areas around airports to (i) reduce ground noise, and emission, (ii) avoid encounters severe weather and prevent incidents and accidents, and (iii) decrease landing distance up to 56% in compared to the “published transition route”. Keywords: air traffic management; operators; high level of automation; optimal trajectories; dy- namic approach and landing procedures; dilemmas; sustainability; environmental impact; emission; greenhouse gases 1. Introduction Due to the technological advances in avionics, operator working environments have become highly automated by complex operator-machine systems. These automated sys- tems may solve some of the previous problems, e.g., reduce workload, increase comfort, however; they often introduce others e.g., reductions in situation awareness, unbalanced operator load (particularly mental, information and communication load), increased stress, and issues of mistrust, boredom, monotony, surprise, confusion, uncertainty, and attention distribution. On the one hand, the aviation systems are or going to be highly automated so that little effort is necessary to control them as long as the automation system is properly functioning. On the other hand, automation systems bring disadvantages to the aviation environment such as increasing the mental and information load of operators and lowering hands-on skills, particularly when avionic systems fail, malfunction, or be under abnormal situations. These new avionic systems require more thought, new skills, high-quality decisions, and as much as fast actions particularly under being in abnormal or emergency situations. Therefore, the operator models, and load monitoring and management become the level of the most critical tasks. The future workstation of operators (air traffic control tower, cockpit, future ground control tower of pilots) and avionics systems need to be Sustainability 2021, 13, 5451. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13105451 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability