CLOUD COMPUTING
Eleven million flights. That’ s the scale of air traffic EUROCONTROL managed across Europe in 2025, with projections hitting 12.4 million annual flights by 2031.
To safely support this growth, the organisation is replacing its 25-yearold legacy IT systems with a cloud-first strategy powered by Red Hat OpenShift. The partnership gives EUROCONTROL the scalability and digital sovereignty needed for mission-critical infrastructure, while shifting engineering focus away from hardware maintenance and toward next-generation aviation innovation.
As Head of Technology at EUROCONTROL, Antonio Licu is leading the digital transformation of Europe’ s core air traffic infrastructure to an agile, cloudnative future. Speaking to Technology Magazine, he breaks down how this modern architecture keeps European skies moving.
“The biggest challenge was not technical but rather to take our teams with us”
Antonio Licu
Head of Technology Division EUROCONTROL
Q. WHY IS MODERNISING EUROCONTROL’ S TECHNOLOGY DIVISION SO CRITICAL RIGHT NOW, AND HOW DOES YOUR ROLE BRIDGE THE GAP BETWEEN COMPLEX CLOUD-NATIVE IT AND EVERYDAY EUROPEAN AIRSPACE SAFETY?
» From both a leadership and a stakeholder perspective, modernising EUROCONTROL’ s technology assets through the Integrated Network Management( iNM) programme has two main objectives: first, to eliminate the obsolescence risk of the NM legacy systems and second, to deliver a digital transformation – namely, a resilient, agile and open architecture system ensuring state-of-the-art support to NM and network operations. iNM addresses the obsolescence of the legacy NM OPS systems, which had reached its limits in performance, agility and technical sustainability. It reduces technical debt, resolves inconsistencies between flight and flow management systems, removes overlaps in data provision, and improves human machine interfaces, contingency and knowledge management, creating a more resilient, reliable, future-ready network system.
And as for digital transformation, we are modernising core assets, increasing operational efficiency and supporting new concepts of operations. We are using technology and architecture to ensure business continuity, augment human capabilities, improve decision-making and bring greater agility to the organisation and its engineering practices.
174 September 2026