SPEAKER_01 0:11

Welcome to a podcast IFATCA Spotlight, where we normally shine a light on a member association, but this time we are recording a special episode and shine a light on the newly re-elected president of IFATC, Helena Chestrim Falk. Welcome to the podcast, Helena.

SPEAKER_00 0:27

Thank you very much, Thorsten.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

Congrats to being re-elected. It was just on the annual conference, which happened just a few days ago in Bucharest. How did you experience the conference? What did you like about it most?

SPEAKER_00 0:40

As always, what I like about the World Conference is the chance to meet everybody from the whole world at the same time. And you meet them in a way that you never do over online and Zoom meetings. What I liked best, I think, about the conference, two things. First, there was a lot of newcomers, a lot of people who were there for the very first time, and younger people, which is excellent because that's really what we need. But also that the conference in itself ran so very smoothly. It is a lot of work behind the scenes, but this was one of the absolute best run conferences that I've at least been part of the sort of behind the scenes. So that was magnificent. It was a lot of work leading up to it, but while we were there, everything just worked.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

Sounds really good. For our listeners, how many participants were there in Bucharest?

SPEAKER_00 1:36

There were about 400 people there present. And totally out of our now 128 member associations, 94 were represented. And I think 20 out of those were proxies, and the rest were there in person. So that's a very good number. It's not a record-breaking number, but it's still very good.

SPEAKER_01 1:59

Yeah, I enjoyed it as well. That getting in contact with all these EDCOs from around the world, we all belong to the EDCO and IFATCA family, and we can talk about our profession. That's uh just great. I mentioned in the beginning that you are the president of IFATCA. What does it mean? Who are you the president of? What do you have to do as a president, Helena?

SPEAKER_00 2:22

Well, I'm the president of the federation, which means that the federation is in itself a conglomerate or an association of many, many, many associations. So every country has their own Air Traffic Controllers Association, and these in turn belong to the Federation. So I'm now the president of the Federation, and that means mostly that I am very much the face towards the external world to a large part, but also that I am the chairperson of the board of the executive board of IFATCA.

SPEAKER_01 3:02

And when you say executive board, what does it mean? How many people are you and how how is it structured?

SPEAKER_00 3:08

We are 12 members on the executive board. Nine of those are elected, and they also have voting rights. Besides those nine, we have three that are our office manager, Tatiana, who works in Montreal. She's the only person also in IFATCA who has a salary. The rest is working on a volunteer basis. We also have our representative to ICAO. If FATCA has a seat in the Air Navigation Commission in ICAO, to make it short, that's where ICAO writes the rules for air traffic controllers. So that means that we are now part of the rulemaking work. We're part of writing the rules that air traffic controllers will have in their manuals in about eight years from now, because that's how long it takes. And the third person on the executive board who does not have voting rights is our communications coordinator. And right now it's Nicola from Ireland, and she's in charge of our communication, both external and internal.

SPEAKER_01 4:09

Basically, my boss at this point, yes.

SPEAKER_00 4:12

Basically your boss. And the rest nine who have voting rights, that that is the president, me. And then we have uh a finance person, and then we have four regional vice presidents. So If it's built out of four geographical regions. So that's Europe, that's Asia Pacific, Africa, Middle East, and the Americas. These four regions, they each elect a spokesperson for them. So those are the four regional vice presidents. And then we also have a vice president for professional issues, and we call professional issues that's basically human factors, legal issues, medical issues, and things like that. And we also have a vice president for the technical issues, that's basically the systems that we work with. Uh so that made four or four. We're missing one. I did not mention JF, the deputy president. So the deputy president is also in elected position. And right now it's uh Jean-Francois Lepache from Canada, who works as an ACC controller and supervisor in Montreal.

SPEAKER_01 5:22

You are from all over the world, which is basically the idea of IFATCA. And how do you meet? How do you get in touch with each other? And uh, do you meet regularly in person or how do you do it?

SPEAKER_00 5:35

We meet regularly, both electronically and in person. So we have meetings via Zoom online every two weeks. Besides that, we are constantly on WhatsApp and email, so we basically meet every day, but we also meet in in person for board meetings twice a year. And that falls usually in September and in February. And besides that, we also meet, of course, at the annual conference, and a few of us will be at maybe the same regional meeting, and then there are all the other gatherings like uh Airspace World coming up now in Lisbon in May. I think there will be four or five of us there, depending on who gets invited to speak on different panels and so on. So we do meet in person regularly as well, but mostly we we talk online.

SPEAKER_01 6:26

Right. Thank you for the great overview. You mentioned the regional meetings. We have been to the annual conference, which is the big thing that's happening once a year. Everybody from around the world together in one place. And the regional meetings are within the four regions that you mentioned. And who goes where? How do you split up that kind of work?

SPEAKER_00 6:46

Well, anybody who belongs to the region. So if you were from Germany, I'm from Sweden. So when I was working as part of the board of the Swedish Air Traffic Controllers Association, I would be going to the European meeting. So you belong to a region, basically, and then it's up to your individual member association, your home MA, as we like to say, to decide who gets to go to what meetings. That's probably your president or at least your board that decides. But within the executive board of IFATCA, we decide together. Uh, the president, me, right now, I try to go to as many meetings as I can, but also as I am wanted to. It's not given that the executive vice presidents for the region really wants the president there every year, because maybe they've set a theme, and let's say that the theme this year could be GNSS. So that's not one of my specialty areas, but maybe we do have somebody on the board who is really in to that subject, and then they would maybe make a request. Uh, it would be great if I could have Tom there, because he has worked with GNSS for for years and years, and he can give a talk about that. So that's more or less how it works. We decide together. But the executive vice presidents, they really have a big say in who goes where.

SPEAKER_01 8:13

Yeah, actually, GNSS is a huge topic in uh Europe. So GPS jamming and spoofing, yeah. Definitely needs to be talked about, talked about unfortunately.

SPEAKER_00 8:23

And I this was I just made an example up now. So I don't know if Tom, in this case, our executive vice president finance Tom McRobert from Australia, I don't know his knowledge of GNSS. So maybe don't ask him to come and speak about it, because maybe that's not his thing.

SPEAKER_01 8:40

And uh at the uh last conference when you were re-elected, you said actually that you're looking forward to another two years and that you're really happy. And I was really happy to hear that. I love it when people are not being elected and they go, uh, I'm just gonna do another two years. And you're smiling at the moment. I love that. So what are your plans? Do you have kind of a kind of idea what you want to do in the next two years or what you want to continue to build on?

SPEAKER_00 9:07

Yes, I do, definitely. When I when I started work on the executive board, that was 2019, when I came on as a deputy president, my my first or one I had several goals actually. I felt that we needed to get together as a federation. We needed to find our way back to the strong commitment and friendship that we share towards each other and also to our profession. If we don't stand united, I don't believe that we will have much chance of having the kind of influence in the development of the ATM system in the future that we would like to have. So that was my first and most important thing to try to bring the federation together and uh create an environment, if you will, within the executive board, but also in the entire federation where people felt that they could make a difference and that they could contribute, whether whether they had only three years of experience of air traffic control or 33 years, there's something that everybody can do. And also it was very important to me to to try to create an environment where everybody is welcome and seen and valued. And we needed better diversity, both on the executive board, but in all the different working groups and committees that we have, because, and this is both because it's nice, but even more importantly, it's because it's been proven time and time again that organizations and corporations that have uh good diversity, they are better. They produce more in both efficiency, but also it's measurable in monetary means. So those were two big things that started already in 2019, and I think we've come a really long way. Now, the goal that I asked the executive board to unite behind in 2024 when I first came on as president was to make IFATCA the gold standard in all things ATC. And what I mean by that is that I see a vision in the future where it should be absolutely self-evident for any journalist, any airline manufacturer, any politician, any NSP or our regulators, if they need to know about air traffic control, if they have questions or if they need input that has to do with the actual profession of air traffic control, it should be obvious to them where to go. And it should be IFATGA. So I would like us to create for ourselves a position where we are needed to do input, to have input, and to in that way influence the future of air traffic control. And I think that we are really on a good way towards that. In one of the presentations that we had in Bucharest, we had the uh the newly chosen chief of ATM with us from Montreal, Crystal. And in her presentation, she said that IFATCA is now indispensable in IKO's work. I want to continue that work. In addition to that, I think that it takes about two years in a new role until you have really started to find your footing, until you really, really know, sort of you've learned, even though I've been involved in the federation for long and I I worked as deputy president, but that's a different role. I think two years is almost the minimum, depending on what you do and what you want to do, of course, with the role. But now I feel that I've sort of learned a lot of things. I've created like a a platform that I think that I can continue together with the executive board to really uh work on. And I think we're going to see in the future that we will have more and more influence and impact into ATM. And that's the whole goal.

SPEAKER_01 13:26

Great. I'm looking forward to the future. Awesome. You mentioned being the gold standard and being especially the gold standard, which is important in Montreal at ICEO. Who's doing work over there?

SPEAKER_00 13:38

Well, first of all, of course, we have David Perks from Australia. He is our representative in the Air Navigation Commission. And besides that, we have I think it's around 14, 15 people who work in the various panels that the commission is working on. But one person that really who also received an award in Bucharest, a special award of appreciation, is uh Rick Taylor. And uh I've just learned that he has been named vice chair of the ATM ops panel, so that's really, really good news.

SPEAKER_01 14:16

Yeah, I love Rick. We met in Bucharest as well, and you don't find a person every day when I can really geek out about the 44-44 IKEO document, and with Rick I can. It's really, really nice. Before when we talked about the regional meetings, you talked about themes for meetings, but uh Ifatka is theme-driven as well. What's the theme at the moment?

SPEAKER_00 14:40

Yeah, we just started this working year with a new theme, and that theme is controllers, attract them, value them, keep them. So we've been working now three consecutive years with themes that all deal with workforce, with controllers and the training and retention of controllers. So now controllers attract them, value them, keep them, has to do, of course, with the great staff shortage that we have seen for years and that we currently see no end of. It's incredibly important to keep the controllers that we have. First we have to find them, that's difficult enough. Then we have to train them, even more difficult. But now I think that it's important to sort of remind ourselves and the air navigation service providers that we need to be aware of that the next generations that come into air traffic controls may not stay there forever, like we have, my generation. This new generation can maybe have a job five years, even if they've worked very hard to get there. That doesn't mean that they are there forever. If they decide to do something else, they will. So we need to make it good enough for them to stay.

SPEAKER_01 15:56

Yeah, I had lots of conversations at the meeting. In Europe it might not be that much of a problem, but uh in other regions lots and lots of people just leave ATC and uh do something else. Uh it's a real shame. Thank you, Helena, for giving us a brief overview and congrats again to your election. Looking forward to great things. And at the end in this podcast, we always talk about local languages. What is air traffic controller in Swedish, Helena?

SPEAKER_00 16:27

Uh yes. I work as a flyer.

SPEAKER_01 16:31

Is that flight leader or something?

SPEAKER_00 16:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:34

Sounds good. And um what would be the normal way to say goodbye in Sweden?

SPEAKER_00 16:39

We would say heldor.

SPEAKER_01 16:42

So hell do it is. Thank you very much, Helena. Heldu.

SPEAKER_00 16:46

Thank you. Hey hey.