With over 15 years of contributions to the state-of-the-art in Air Traffic Management (ATM), currently enabling the path towards its digitalisation, Dimitri now heads the Unmanned Aircraft Systems Traffic Management (UTM) Research group at Cranfield University.
Before joining Cranfield, Dimitri worked as an ATM Systems Specialist at Air Navigation Solutions at Gatwick Airport, where he led the development of the Airport's 10-year Capacity Enhancement Roadmap to optimise and improve operations and infrastructure to enable Air Traffic Movement growth, which identified Operational Improvements from SESAR and NextGen Programmes and coordinated the different Airport stakeholders, including Airlines, Ground Handlers, Air Traffic Control to implement these solutions. During that time, Dimitri delivered a number of ATM systems to enable Airport operations and capacity growth, including an extension to its multi-lateration system, to allow a new Boeing Hangar (fitting 2 Code F aircraft) to be built without affecting operations.
Previous to this, Dimitri was a Senior Project Systems Engineer at NATS (formerly National Air Traffic Services), where he single-handedly delivered complex multi-million pounds Surveillance solutions to Airports, on time and on budget. This included the very first use of an X-band radar for windfarm mitigation in the UK.
Dimitri holds a PhD from Imperial College London on Satellite Navigation and Positioning Systems, with a thesis that developed innovative statistical algorithms to monitor and guarantee the integrity of GNSS-based position and navigation computations within safety-critical aircraft flight management systems. It was the first time Extreme Value Theory was introduced in an ATM-related field.