“This has been the toughest competition yet,” said one long-standing judge of air traffic management award programmes. “The number and quality of candidates have been unusually high, reflecting a new wave of innovation spreading though all sectors of the industry.”
The Seamless Skies Awards, developed to recognise exceptional achievements in the global air traffic management (ATM) and UAS traffic management (UTM) sectors during 2025, attracted over 80 entrants in six different categories, with Poland’s PANSA picking up the coveted, Overall Excellence award for its “Skyward Synergy” programme, a rapid and effective response to the challenge of efficiently managing air traffic in an unpredictable region of Europe’s airspace.
“The geopolitical situation in Eastern Europe has fundamentally reshaped aviation operations,” said PANSA in its submission. “Since the outbreak of war in Ukraine, military activity across the region has intensified significantly. Airspace requirements emerge rapidly and unpredictably, often requiring immediate activation of restricted areas to support national defence and NATO operations.”
PANSA addressed this challenge by transforming civil-military coordination into an integrated operational ecosystem. At the centre of this transformation is a dynamic Collaborative Decision-Making framework that connects civil aviation authorities, military command structures, and national security stakeholders, enabling real-time airspace allocation, automated exchange of ASM data, rapid activation of temporary and ad-hoc airspace areas and shared situational awareness across all stakeholders.
In the Building the lower airspace economy category NAV CANADA, Unifly and Transport Canada secured the top spot with their dual approach to lower airspace management. In 2025, NAV CANADA delivered two landmark achievements: Project Evolution and a National Drone Incident Response Protocol. With Project Evolution consortium members expanded automated access to controlled airspace and processing over 60,000 drone authorisations annually with an automated approval rate exceeding 78%. Canada’s National Drone Incident Response Protocol is a first-of-its-kind national framework establishing how Canada responds when drone operations go wrong. Together, these achievements represent both sides of a safe lower airspace economy: enabling legitimate operations and managing potentially unsafe ones. The runner-up spot in this category was taken by Wing. In 2025, Wing achieved a critical commercial inflection point, demonstrating that its highly automated drone delivery model works securely and efficiently at scale. In 2025 Wing managed the world’s largest drone delivery expansion ever, targeting some of the largest retail markets in the U.S., including Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Orlando, and Tampa.
In the Collaborative operations for sustainable skies category, the winning entry came from Airways New Zealand and Airservices Australia who have replaced traditional centralised training models with mobile simulation, remote recruitment and selection and cross-border training. This collaboration has accelerated the recruitment and training of new controllers by integrating selection, training and simulation, leading to safer operations, faster time-to-competency, lower cost and carbon footprint, and fewer roster impacts without compromising standards. One initiative alone reduced national training timelines by 60%. The runner-up spot in this category was taken by the IFAV3 Sesar Project – Increased Flexibility of ATCO Validations – consortium, comprising DLR, ENAIRE, Deep Blue, ENAV, Indra, LFV, Universidad Politecnica De Madrid (UPM), Linkopings Universitet (LiU), NLR and NATS. This projectaddresses the challenge of limited availability of air traffic controllers by enabling a more flexible deployment of ATCOs, reducing training overhead and advancing flexible endorsement strategies, procedural means, and technical enablers.
The Innovation to enable safer, more efficient operations section was fiercely contested and was won by Avinor ANS – the first ANSP in the world to manage airport operations of eight airports from a single digital tower centre. Throughout 2025, Avinor ANS developed the technology and procedures to create multiple airport operations from a digital remote tower centre, enabling one person to manage traffic at multiple airports when traffic levels allow. A major software upgrade formed a complete, ready-to-launch solution and marked the moment Avinor moved from vision to operational capability. In the beginning of 2026, Avinor ANS launched multiple airport operations at the Remote Tower Centre (RTC) in Bodo, allowing one qualified operator to manage traffic at up to three airports simultaneously. A world first. Second spot in this category was taken by ROMATSA RA and Indra with the world’s first ANSP FF-ICE/R1 deployment, which has allowed flight plans to evolve from static messages to living digital objects able to move, update and be shared seamlessly across stakeholders and continents in real time.
Greenland Airports, Frequentis & Comsa came first in the Remarkable people and workforce category. When work began to develop Qaqortoq Airport in 2025 there was no runway, no tower, no road access. There was only exposed terrain, Arctic weather and a helipad. Within a few months in 2025, a small, highly committed team helped to transform this site into a future-ready airport with digital tower capability to benefit the regions remote communities now, as well as support long term economic and connectivity goals. The experience combined technical achievement, human connection, and resilience, culminating in a highly successful deployment in one of the world’s most remote and demanding environments. Austro Control’s #542morrow programme earned the runner-up spot in this category. This is an organisation-wide innovation programme that enables every employee to strengthen the provision of air navigation services, making decision-making transparent, and inviting innovation as a collective practice.
In the Safety, security and resilience category, PANSA won the top spot with its Skyward Synergy programme (see above). In second place came Frequentis AG, who provided the German Armed Forces (WTD61) with a unified operational “drone air picture” and the digital services required to safely manage UAS operations in complex mixed-airspace environments.
The Seamless skies for all category was won by NASA, which developed, for the first time, the fundamental architecture of a safe, scalable high-altitude traffic management system. During 2025 the system was demonstrated live with real aircraft data. “High-altitude airspace – roughly 50,000 feet and above, well above commercial airline cruising levels – is experiencing a surge of interest from sectors ranging from telecommunications to disaster response to scientific research,” said NASA. The vehicles are diverse: lighter-than-air, solar-powered, slow-moving, and designed to stay in one region for days or weeks and this has created a traffic management challenge that has no precedent in conventional ATM. Runner-up in this category was DFS Deutsche Flugsicherung with its “Germany’s ATCO Operational Model for Drone Integration in Controlled Airspace” programme which has allowed the ANSP to align long-standing ATM rules and safety principles with the emerging operational needs, regulatory specificities, and rapidly evolving use cases of UAS. Building on this foundation, DFS has developed a comprehensive operational model for integrating UAS into controlled airspace.
This year Seamless Skies Awards also featured, for the first time, a CANSO Person of the Year award. Micilia Albertus-Verboom, Director General, DC-ANSP, was elected winning recipient, with Ahmed Al Jallaf, Assistant Director General – Air Navigation Services, UAE GCAA, taking second place.