Access Blueprint
Getting space-based flight tracking to market four years early
How Access Partnership helped Aireon turn a frontier space technology into a protected, commercially viable global service, by treating international policy not as an obstacle to be waited out, but as a market to be built.
Client
Aireon – a joint venture of Iridium and a consortium of air navigation service providers.
Challenge
A frontier space-based aviation service could not reach market without aligning spectrum treaty and global aviation standards.
Our role
Designed and executed the market-access campaign across the ITU, ICAO, regional bodies, and national governments worldwide.
Outcome
Secured global spectrum allocation four years faster than any normal path would have allowed, turning a frontier space technology into a protected, commercially viable global service.
Seven years after launch, Aireon’s service is now embedded in global aviation. We look back at the regulatory breakthrough that made that possible, and why accelerating it by four years mattered.
An international problem
What do you do when a quarter-billion-dollar joint venture has frontier technology with global potential, but no clear path to market?
Aireon set out to do something ground radar could never: track every aircraft, anywhere on Earth, in real time.
Planes were already sending out tracking signals, but those signals only reached receivers on the ground, and only where there was infrastructure. Aireon’s plan was simple: put Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) receivers on a network of satellites so that aircraft could be seen not just over busy continents, but across vast oceanic and polar regions that had always been blind spots.
Until this point, aircraft over oceans, polar routes, and remote airspace were tracked by procedural position reports, typically only every 10 to 14 minutes. Space-based ADS-B would deliver real-time continuous surveillance, more accurate aircraft separation, more direct routings, lower fuel burn, and lower emissions. This opportunity was later shown to contribute to GBP 19 million in annual fuel-burn savings and 45,000 tonnes of CO₂ savings across North Atlantic airspace.1
But Aireon could not sell a safety service until the world’s two relevant rule-making bodies agreed it could exist.
This is where Access Partnership’s role began: translating a frontier technology into the regulatory, technical, and political conditions required for market entry.
Two gatekeepers, one impossible clock
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) controlled the radio spectrum. The 1087.7–1092.3 MHz band was already protected for ground-based reception of ADS-B signals, but satellite reception was the missing piece. Without a primary allocation for satellite reception in that band, the service could not be operated on a protected, commercial basis anywhere in the world. That decision could only be taken at a treaty negotiation, the World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC), among 190-plus member states. WRCs are held roughly every four years.
The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) set the operational standards that national aviation authorities implement. Without ICAO alignment, regulators had no basis to certify the service for safety-of-life use.
Both bodies operate through deliberate, consensus-based processes. WRC agendas are set four years in advance, so getting a new regulation adopted is an eight-year process; ICAO standards are built through consensus across overlapping panels and working groups. The next WRC was scheduled for the next year: 2015. Space-based ADS-B was not on its agenda. Each additional four-year slip meant delaying not only Aireon’s commercial launch, but also the wider benefits the service could unlock.
Worse, Aireon faced an incumbent that had every reason to keep things exactly as they were: a single ground-based provider whose service, the same procedural position reports described above, had defined the status quo for decades, and had no commercial incentive to see it replaced. It was the quiet, capable, well-connected opposition to any new entrant in space-based air traffic surveillance.
Aireon “knew they needed [it] solving. They didn’t really have a view of how.”
Gregory Francis, Executive Vice Chair and project lead, Access Partnership
They engaged Access Partnership with a single objective: compress a multi-year international policy cycle into eighteen months, and do it against the kind of institutional resistance that most challengers never overcome.
The prize: continuous, real-time surveillance over the North Atlantic — the world’s busiest oceanic airspace, and the first region to go live.
The solution
Access Partnership framed the problem as a single, coordinated international campaign with three non-negotiable milestones and a hard deadline of WRC-15 in November 2015.
Milestone 1: Get onto the agenda of a conference that was already full
WRC agenda items are normally fixed years in advance. But Access Partnership identified a rare pathway: the Plenipotentiary Conference, a ministerial-level gathering of all ITU member states. The conference has the authority to direct the WRC to take up an agenda item, even though it almost never uses it. In October 2014, at the Plenipotentiary Conference in Busan, Access Partnership did exactly that; a procedural breakthrough that seasoned practitioners described as without precedent in living memory.
Access Partnership built a cross-regional case. The team worked with governments bilaterally, engaged regional air transport and telecommunication organisations, and connected the technical argument to the safety and environmental priorities that mattered in each capital. This approach helped convert enough ministerial-level delegations to deliver the decision.
The result: Resolution 185 (Busan, 2014), “Global flight tracking for civil aviation,” instructing WRC-15 to take up the issue as a matter of urgency.2 In practical terms, Aireon now had what it needed. A place on the WRC-15 agenda, and a live route to a decision that would otherwise have been years away.
While the ITU campaign moved forward, Access Partnership was also running a second, parallel track at ICAO. Because Aireon’s consortium included Canadian investors, the team secured an unusual position: embedding directly inside Canada’s own delegation to ICAO, working the same eighteen-month window as the WRC campaign, to help move the operational standard that would let national regulators certify the service for safety-of-life use. It was an unfamiliar arrangement for the Canadian delegation, which had not worked alongside a private-sector consultant in this way before, and Access Partnership had to earn its place inside the room as much as it earned support outside it. Running the ITU and ICAO tracks together, rather than waiting for one to conclude before starting the other, meant that when the spectrum allocation came through at WRC-15, the operational standard needed to act on it was already in place.
Milestone 2: Build consensus in every region of the world in twelve months, not three years
Every other item at WRC-15 had benefited from roughly three years of preparatory study, regional debate and bilateral education. At this point space-based ADS-B had less than one. Access Partnership ran a parallel campaign across all five continents, working through each of the stakeholder bodies that feed into WRC conclusions, and supporting the client in bilateral engagements with individual administrations, national stakeholders, and international safety organisations.
Two features distinguished the campaign:
The “ends against the middle” method. Rather than ask foreign governments to take a position at the request of a US-Canada consortium, the team identified domestic stakeholders in each priority market whose own interests aligned with the decision, including national carriers, air navigation service providers, safety regulators, and transport ministries, and equipped them to make the case to their own governments. In the United Kingdom, where incumbent interests were especially influential, this meant convening leaders of Virgin Atlantic and the chief executive of NATS (the national air traffic services provider), publishing compelling advocacy in trade and national press, and engaging Number 10 and the Department of Trade and Industry at senior levels. The argument in every capital was pinned to a national priority, such as safety, emissions, competitiveness and cost savings, rather than to a client’s commercial timeline.
Regional positions were used as force multipliers. Access Partnership secured a European Parliament resolution endorsing the safety service. The resolution drew public backing from the European Commissioner for Transport, the Chair of the Parliament’s Transport Committee, and senior leaders from ENAV, the Irish Aviation Authority, and NAV CANADA.3 Regional bodies were deliberately used as controllable, visible forums that could be built up into a positive feedback loop, with each endorsement making the next harder to refuse and the WRC outcome progressively more inevitable.
Milestone 3: Turn consensus into a first-week decision, not a compromise at the final bell
Anyone who has watched a multilateral negotiation knows how it usually ends: contested items drift into the final 24 hours and are resolved between midnight and dawn on closing day, or deferred to the next conference entirely. For a commercial partner waiting to launch, the latter can be the same as failure.
Access Partnership set out to pre-load consensus so comprehensively that WRC-15 could address the agenda item in its opening week. That required deep engagement with the chair of the conference and with the Secretariat, which was broadly sceptical of creating a precedent, and with the leadership of the delegations that shaped the conference’s outcome. The argument to the chair paired a personal case (leadership on a genuinely historic air-safety decision) with an institutional one (an agenda item ripe for early resolution, freeing up conference time for less settled issues).
The first-week resolution was a second breakthrough. After creating a path onto a closed agenda in Busan, Access Partnership helped ensure it was decided before it could be delayed, diluted, or pushed into the final hours of WRC-15.
Throughout the engagement, Access Partnership operated as an extension of Aireon’s market-access function. The team led stakeholder mapping, briefing papers and thought leadership; coordinated media campaigns to build public and political interest in improved air safety; embedded with the Canadian delegation at ICAO; and maintained one consistent message across ministries, regulators, parliaments, press and multilateral secretariats on five continents.
We had the technology, but a breakthrough in the sky means nothing without a path through the rules on the ground. That path, cleared in 2014 and 2015, is what turned a regulatory decision in Geneva into something more than 90 countries rely on today.
The impact
In November 2015, Access Partnership helped secure the decision that moved space-based ADS-B from frontier proposition to global market reality. Seven years after launch, the value of that acceleration is clear. At WRC-15, the conference approved a primary spectrum allocation for satellite reception of ADS-B messages, creating the legal foundation for the service Aireon had been built to deliver.4
With that decision in hand, Aireon’s commercial timeline aligned with Iridium NEXT’s launch. The first Aireon payloads flew on Iridium NEXT satellites from January 2017; the constellation was completed in January 2019; and the system went live over the North Atlantic on 2 April 2019 with NAV CANADA and NATS as launch ANSP users.5 Without the Busan-to-Geneva campaign, that launch would have been delayed by at least another four years or longer.
0yrs
faster to market than any normal regulatory path would have allowed
0+
countries now using the service for air traffic surveillance and management
0%
projected reduction in North Atlantic flight-safety risk
0bn
forecast global ADS-B market by 2035, up from ~$2bn in 2025
For Aireon, Iridium, and its consortium of air navigation service providers (ANSPs), the consequences were immediate, and seven years after launch, still growing:
Speed to market
Four years faster
Entering the market when it did accelerated revenue and brought forward four additional years of safer skies, more efficient routing, lower fuel burn and reduced emissions at global scale. By avoiding another full WRC cycle, Aireon accelerated access to continuous surveillance for ANSPs and airlines years earlier than would otherwise have been possible.
Global Adoption
An expanding customer base
Seven years after launch, Aireon’s service is used by more than 90 countries for air traffic surveillance and management.6 What began as a regulatory breakthrough quickly became part of global aviation infrastructure.
Safety & Environment
Measurable gains
In the North Atlantic alone, joint analysis by NAV CANADA and NATS projected a 76% reduction in flight safety risk.7 Five years in, an independent review confirmed the service’s measured impact, including £19 million in annual fuel-burn savings and 45,000 tonnes of CO₂ avoided per year, delivering roughly £2 in value to airlines for every £1 spent.8 In remote and vast regions such as Africa, Aireon is often the only source of air traffic surveillance, making it instrumental in improving safety and enabling more efficient flight operations.
A new catergory
A market created
Today, space-based ADS-B is a recognised segment within a global ADS-B market forecast to grow from USD 2 billion in 2025 to USD 13 billion by 2035.9 The policy architecture put in place in 2014–2015 is what enabled that market to grow.
Aireon’s Space Based ADS-B service has been a game-changer for air traffic management over the North Atlantic. It has delivered measurable benefits for safety, efficiency, and sustainability.
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