Revelations of poor European ATM performance compared to the USA must spur governments and industry to do better
It's official - Europe's air traffic management (ATM) system is unproductive and not cost-efficient. Well, at least it is compared to its US counterpart. That's the view of Eurocontrol's Performance Review Commission (PRC) in its initial study of the performance of Europe's ATM system compared with the US system. And being a select group of industry experts with airline, air traffic control, navigation and regulatory backgrounds, they should know. The PRC's major finding in its initial investigation of the issue is that the US Federal Aviation Administration controls twice as many instrument flight rules flights at only a slightly higher total cost and with the same number of airtraffic controllers as the 30 Eurocontrol member states. That's a pretty poor performance for Europe by anyone's standards.
While the US and European ATM systems may be similar in certain respects, they are poles apart in others. It's hardly surprising that the US system is more productive and cost-effective than Europe's when the USA has just one integrated air navigation services (ANS) provider, while Europe has 47. Then there is the number of area control centres - the USA has 21, while Europe has 58 stemming from a fragmented system. At the same time, Europe is struggling to work with very different ATC systems according to national preferences and interests, while the USA has a far more homogeneous architecture.
Reasons why the US ATM system is twice as cost-effective as Europe's are of course complex and the PRC has merely scratched the surface. But the PRC's initial findings should now be enough to spur European governments and the continent's air navigation industry into action. That is exactly what the commission wanted when they decided to compare, perhaps controversially, and for the first time, US and European ATM.
A whole range of areas contribute to the performance gap, such as operational differences including traffic complexity and route structure; the collective efficiency of the European ATM system, including its fragmentation, and civil and military airspace arrangements; the individual efficiency or otherwise of European ANS providers; the legal and social framework; and staffing issues which at times result in capacity shortage and at others, capacity waste. These areas affect governments, air navigation service providers, Eurocontrol, ATC personnel, airports and operators and only when all these parties are involved will Europe be capable of resolving its inefficiencies.
Europe is on the way to dealing with some of these issues, primarily those that concern its traffic complexity, airspace design and civil/military airspace co-ordination. Through Eurocontrol the continent is tackling these problems head-on through air route redesigns, the reduced vertical separation minima programme and the move towards the joint provision of air traffic services (ATS) through the Central European Traffic Services programme, for example. No-one doubts that these issues are difficult to resolve, but they are far more socially acceptable than the other problems that now must be confronted.
The real issues that need to be further explored are those that create fear, suspicion and distrust whenever they are mentioned - staff productivity, individual performance of ANS providers and the separation of ATS provision from the state.
Europe is working hard to tackle its capacity and delay problems, but a radical overhaul of the continent's entire ATM provision is now acknowledged to be the only way these capacity-enhancing measures can ever be successful. Europe knows where it wants to get to - a Single European Sky as advocated by the European Commission - but getting there is far harder than many imagined. So far only tiny steps have been made towards getting to the ultimate goal and much bigger steps will be required to tackle the controversial areas in the near future.
A good starting point would be to take the PRC's findings further to investigate the burning issues that contribute to the performance gap between Europe and the USA.
But copying the US system should not be Europe's end goal as that system is by no means a shining example of efficiency. The USA is suffering the same delay problems as Europe, with 26% of all departures on both continents last year encountering delays of 15min or more. Europe should be striving for something better. US ATM has its own problems, but it is still performing far better than Europe's. Perhaps the PRC's findings will shame European governments and industry to accelerate medial action.
Source: Flight International
