Les amis du CENA
A much longer text is available in french here and there is also a wikipage on the french wikipedia.
The Centre d'Etudes et d'Expérimentations de la Navigation Aérienne (CEENA) was created in August 1959 et named Centre d'Expérimentations de la Navigation Aérienne (CENA) in december 1959. René Bulin who was then Directeur de la Navigation Aérienne, decided to create this service after a visit at the National Aviation Facilities Experimental Center (NAFEC, now William J. Hughes technical center), created in 1958 by the FAA. For René Bulin, who played an important part in the creation of Eurocontrol (he was the first director of the agency), the CENA was to become THE european experimental center for ATM (things went different).
In 1960, Jacques Villiers, a well known figure of the Direction de la Navigation Aérienne (DNA), became director of the CENA. This same year, Dominique Alvarez who was just graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole Nationale de l'Aviation Civile (ENAC) arrived at CENA.
Jacques Villiers (who started working for the DNA en 1948 after graduating from the Ecole Polytechnique and the ENAC) had been interested in Air Traffic Management automatization since the beginning of his career. He was the key lobbyist in the creation of the first CAUTRA (Coordonnateur Automatique du TRafic Aérien), the french air traffic navigation system.
From the beginning, the french ATC automation project is "human centered": the operator remains at the center of the ATC system. The second axiom of the french project is that air traffic controllers should have to spend a minimal amount of time entering information in the system. Those axioms are quite different from the philosophy of the US ATC system, where ATCO were asked to use keyboards very early, and also from the philosophy of the Eurocontrol experimental center (under the direction of Georges Maignan), which worked on full automation projects, such as ARC2000.
The development of the CAUTRA 1 system was managed by Dominique Alvarez and took place at the Athis Mons Air Traffic Control Center from 1961 to 1965. The first module was the Système de Traitement Plan de Vol (STPV), or Flight Plan System. The system automatically delivered paper strips on the control position. Developped by a small team of skilled engineers, the system was extremely efficient for a small development cost. In 1962 ATC quarterly dedicated an article to the french system, praying the work done at CENA.
CAUTRA II was developped from 1965 to 1970, still under the direction of Dominique Alvarez. Primary radars were replaced by secondary radars, and radar displays became digital, with a computerized radar processing system, and the first HMIs.
Jacques Villiers left CENA in 1970 and was replaced by Dominique Alvarez. In 1970, the development of CAUTRA 3 started. It was a major upgrade with multi-radars data processing, the first safety net, etc... But things didn't go smoothly. First, the french "plan calcul" forced CENA to buy CII 10070 computers instead of their usual IBMs, and the disk drives of the 10070 were not as reliable as their IBM counterparts. Second, the development team was still composed of less than 25 persons, for a system which was now used for all France and not only for the Athis control centre. Third, France political system was slowly changing: while Charles de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou were the champions of systems mainly developped and maintained by french civil servants, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, who was elected in 1974 was more influenced by a "liberal" point of view.
After some bitter internal wars, the DNA decided to give the development
of the future new CAUTRA 4 system to STNA as head designer, with a large
part given to private corporations such as SYSECA.
CENA lost also its experimentation mission, and its main activity was to be
R&D. Its name was thus changed to
"Centre d'Études de la Navigation Aérienne".
CAUTRA 4 was supposed to be developped in an industrial and professional
way, but things went bad from the start. The private company chosen had no
experience in ATM (they had mainly developped radar systems for the french
navy), and the STNA teams had no experience either in computer
programs development.
In 1980, after a few years of unsuccessful work,
the new director of STNA decided to ask Jean-Marc Garot
who was the head of the radar division of CENA to become the leader of
the CAUTRA 4 team.
Jean-Marc Garot decided to change lot of things; SYSECA lost a large part of
its responsabilities in the design of the system and he also used the
experience and skills of the CENA teams for the development of the new system.
However it still took five more years for CAUTRA 4 to replace CAUTRA 3 in
the mid-80s. The
CAUTRA 3 system was then dying of old age, as it was still running on 10070
computers, computers which dated back to the 60s. But regarding
functionalities CAUTRA 3 was still ahead of CAUTRA 4...
In 1985, CENA was at last no longer working on the development and maintenance of the CAUTRA system. Its main mission was now R&D, but there were no research competencies at CENA and there was not a single member of CENA who had a PhD. This was not a problem for short and medium term studies, but "long term" or "innovative" activities had to be developped in the general framework of research activities.
To try to overcome this problem, the DNA decided in 1987 to send a
part of the CENA on the Toulouse-Rangueil
campus, on the location of the ENAC, extremely close to the
Toulouse university of science.
This same year, after two years spent in the USA as special advisor
of the manager of the
"Advanced Automation System" project at the FAA,
Jean-Marc Garot became the new director of CENA.
Under his direction, from 1988 to 1994, CENA would become the first
european R&D ATM center, with around 150 full time engineers or
researchers.
The relationships between research and the rest of CENA were always a complex problem. In the mid-nineties, CENA and ENAC created common research laboratories, such as the LEEA (economy) and the LOG (Global Optimisation Laboratory). The LOG would be the main designer of the algorithms of the ERASMUS project, which would later be used again in the SESAR WP-4 project. These common laboratories disappeared between 2003 and 2005, for many different reasons.
Alain Printemps replaced Jean-Marc Garot (who became head of the
Eurocontrol Experimental Center) as director of CENA in
1994. He had worked in CENA in the late 70s and had been the main
designer of the french safety net. His mandate was plagued by
financial constraints, and by the long
ongoing feud between CENA and STNA regarding the design of the new
tools of the french ATM systems. He was however the leader of the
European PhareX consortium and he maintained the CENA leadership in
Europe regarding ATM R&D.
Between 2005 and 2007, DNA was reorganized and CENA and STNA were
merged into a single entity called DTI (Direction de la Technique et
de l'Innovation), but both services maintained a relative
independance, CENA becoming SDER (Sous direction des études et de la
recherche) and STNA becoming SDSO (Sous direction des systèmes
opérationnels). Alain Printemps left and was replaced by Philippe
Merlo as head of SDER. Philippe Merlo was the first director of
CENA/SDER who had never worked previously at CENA; he had until then
mainly be a manager at DNA.
A few months later, Philippe Merlo became director of DTI and
SDER was exploded in different departments. The R&D department
of DTI still had some of the missions of the former CENA, such as the
applied research missions, but it was much smaller (less than half of
the former CENA). The historical building of CENA at Athis-Mons was
nearly closed; a large number of the personnels of Athis decided to leave
for other services of DNA, and a few of them were sent to the former
site of STNA.
Patrick Dujardin would be the first head of the R&D department. He had previously worked at CENA on the development of the HMI of the ATM systems. He left in 2009 to become director of research activities at the Ecole Nationale de la Météorologie. He was replaced by Jean-Marc Alliot, who had been the director of the LOG (common laboratory between CENA and ENAC) in the 90s.
In 2011, the R&D department was suppressed and
replaced by a EEI (Etudes
Européennes et Innovation) department, which lost its applied research
missions. The head of the former R&D department left DTI and became
head of department 5 at
IRIT,
the building of CENA on
the Rangueil campus was given back to ENAC and
all applied research activities were ended. The members of the R&D
department were either sent to ENAC for those (around 10) holding a
PhD, or sent back to DTI on the former site of STNA (many of those simply
decided to leave DTI for other services).
The leader of ATM R&D
in Europe is now Spain, which took the direction of the Sesar WP-E
project, thus ending 50 years of french leadership.
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