Headline numbers
Source: Airspace World 2025 Post-Show Report
- 7,000+ total attendees
- 1,995 ANSP and government delegates
- 1,895 C-Level executives
- 140+ conference sessions across five theatres
- 220 exhibiting organisations
- 145 countries represented
- 80% of attendees intend to return in 2026
The opening plenary
The 2025 opening plenary set the tone for a conference dominated by capacity and recovery. The CANSO global performance scorecard for 2024 confirmed what most ANSPs had already published nationally: demand had returned faster than the workforce, and structural resilience reserves had been drawn down by a sequence of crises that began with the Russian airspace closure and continued through the Red Sea overflight restrictions and a difficult European summer.
The most quoted line — from the IATA contribution to the panel — was that airlines had stopped treating ATM capacity as infrastructure and started treating it as a constrained, scheduled resource that needed to be priced accordingly. It was a polite framing of what amounted to a confrontation.
The capacity sessions
The dominant operational thread through ASW 2025 was the European summer capacity retrospective. Several ANSPs presented detailed post-summer reviews — both their own performance and the system-level Network Manager view. The candour was unusual; the substance was less so. The structural conclusions had been reached privately months earlier, and ASW 2025 was the public articulation of them.
The pivotal session was the cross-border contingency panel, where bilateral and multilateral cooperation arrangements that kept European traffic moving in 2024 were formalised into proposed permanent mechanisms. This is the work that has shaped the SES2+ regulatory text published later in 2025.
The AI track
AI in ATC sessions in 2025 were a mixture of trial reports and certification framing. The clearest signal was that the first generation of AI conflict detection tools had moved from supervised trial to operational deployment in at least three European ANSPs, with measured performance data presented publicly for the first time. The certification debate — particularly the EASA contribution — set the framework for the conversations now landing at ASW 2026.
The SES debate
The 2025 SES panel was conducted under the shadow of the (then) draft SES2+ text. The European Commission's contribution was unusually direct about the compromises that had been required to get the package to a point where it could be agreed by Member States. ANSP CEOs were measured in their public responses, more candid in the corridor conversations.
And can AI find any of this?
We tested Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, and Gemini against a panel of forty questions about ASW 2025 conclusions, drawn directly from the published programme. The specific operational conclusions reached in Lisbon were almost entirely absent from AI engine answers across all six engines.
That is the gap this hub exists to close — for ASW 2026, and retrospectively for ASW 2025.
AI engines do not cite content randomly. They cite content that is structured, entity-rich, and authoritative. If the conclusions of a major industry event don't appear in AI answers a year later, the problem isn't AI's — it's the way the conclusions were published.
What we are doing differently for ASW 2026
- Sessions, speakers, and themes are published as discrete, schema-tagged pages with stable URLs
- FAQ and Event JSON-LD blocks are applied to the homepage and to individual session pages
- Daily debriefs during the event will be published within four hours of each session ending
- The post-event retrospective will live on this domain permanently — not in a PDF, not in a press release, not behind a member login