Air Transport System Agility: The Agile Response Capability (ARC) Methodology for Crisis Preparedness

Aviation is a highly inter-connected system. This means that a problem in one area maycause effects in other countries or parts of the Air Transport System (ATS). Examples range from localair traffic disruptions to the 2010 volcanic ash crisis. Agility, like resilience, refers to the ability to copewith dynamics and complexity in a flexible manner, by adjusting and adapting performance and theorganization of work to fit changing demands. The aim of this work is to help ATS organizationswith increasing their agility in the face of crises and challenges. To this end, this article presents theAgile Response Capability (ARC) guidance material. ARC was developed from a literature study anda number of case studies that combined past event analysis, interviews, focus groups, workshops,questionnaires, and exercise observation methodologies. ARC aims to help aviation organizations toset up, run, and evaluate exercises promoting agility to handle disturbances and crises, and to enablestructured pro-active and retrospective analysis of scenarios and actual events. The elements andsteps of the ARC approach are illustrated and exemplified with data from three case studies. TheARC methodology facilitates more agile and resilient ways of responding to the fundamental andnovel surprises that have become almost commonplace in the past decade, and are likely to continueto do so.