Ask a European airline executive about air traffic control (ATC) and the response is almost universal. A shake of the head followed by a fist-thumping demand that something be done. In March, departure delays reached record levels and when Eurocontrol, the body that controls Europe's airspace, calculates its final figures for May, they are expected to make March look like a good month.
From almost every angle and statistic, ATC will be to blame for the bulk of delays. Even Eurocontrol admits ATC is the largest single reason for the new records. More than 80% of all delays last year were caused by insufficient capacity in ATC, it says.
This year the Kosovo conflict exacerbated this statistic. Flights over the former Yugoslavia were barred while the skies over parts of Italy, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary were severely restricted. Europe also had to accommodate the thousands of extra of military flights that entered its airspace.
But even if the disruption around Kosovo is eliminated from the overall delay statistics, ATC-induced hold-ups between January and April were more than double the levels in 1998. Part of this was due to a restructuring of French and Swiss airspace, a measure that initially halved capacity in some areas.
Airlines are losing millions of dollars because of these delays. Lufthansa says it is paying for the cost of burning 26,000t of fuel in holding patterns while Austrian Airlines calculated that ATC-related delays will cost it $52 million this year.
While of little consolation to airline executives, not all of Europe is congested. Phil Hogge, director for infrastructure in Europe at the International Air Transport Association (IATA), says most of Europe's ATC-related delays are caused by a relatively small strip of airspace in the heart of Europe. But this also happens to be the busiest aviation cross-roads in the region.
Lack of capacity
There is a real lack of capacity in an area that stretches from London through the Benelux countries to northern France and south-west Germany, down through Switzerland and the eastern part of France to northern Italy. Most trans-European flights have to transit this area so the effects of a delay here get distributed through most of Europe.
The Association of European Airlines (AEA) is more specific. It also blames particular European sectors, but in a recently published position paper it named individual ATC centres. At the end of 1998, the paper explains, Eurocontrol set individual capacity targets for the 39 control centres, sufficient to accommodate 8% more traffic and gain a 25% decrease in delays. But Paris, Geneva, Zurich, Milan, Padua, Rheims and Karlsruhe indicated they would fall short of the targets. Some of these seven ATCs said they would be unable to absorb any more capacity this year. "When these were factored into the planning model, the result was that with a 6% increase in traffic, delays would increase by 14%," says the AEA.
Europe is not completely saturated. Airlines are not yet having to redraw their route plans in line with ATC capacity constraints, according to the AEA, but the record-breaking levels of hold-ups show where the limits are. Signs are appearing, however, that airlines are cutting back on services to ease congestion. In May, Iberia said it would reduce services to Moscow and Helsinki in response to airspace congestion.
It is becoming all too clear that under the present system, European ATC is close to its limits and without some radical action, gridlock will force airlines to reign back their growth plans.
The frustration of airlines executives is understandable. But the problem is that while alarm bells were ringing in offices of Eurocontrol, the AEA, IATA and dozens of airlines throughout Europe during the mid-1990s, there was no structure to do anything about it.
Eurocontrol has no powers of sanction if a particular ATC centre - or government - fails to reach targets. This year, the combination of an early peak in commercial aircraft traffic and the Kosovo conflict meant that reaching the limits of Europe's ATC capacity was inevitable. There were no means to deal with it.
At the limit
"We are reaching the limits," says Claude Probst, head of international air safety at the European Commission's (EC) transport directorate, DGVII. "This is because of the absence of a tool that would help air traffic controllers to increase productivity, and short-term measures that are difficult to implement because of resistance in some countries."
The problems of recent months were expected. For years, strategists, consultants, airlines and airports predicted the huge boom in air travel across Europe that is materialising. On one day in May, more than 27,000 flights took off and landed in Europe - a record. Since 1994, there has been a steady deterioration in ATC efficiency leading up to this year's records. In 1998, for example, the delays were 30% worse than in 1997, totalling more than 27 million minutes.
The industry was warned in 1989, when delays reached record highs, but the planners of a decade ago failed to come up with a long-term, pan-European solution. Instead, numerous separate upgrades were initiated, some by Eurocontrol, some by individual states. The idea was to make better use of the existing system rather than start a revolution which would create a single European strategy but would also involve the effective surrender of sovereignty over a state's airspace.
These modernisation initiatives have not suddenly stopped working, says Hogge - the problem is that they cannot keep up with the expansion in activity. "Air traffic over the last three years has increased faster than was forecast which has caught people out a bit," Probst adds.
Eurocontrol and the 39 ATC centres scattered across Europe are still initiating new projects to help ease congestion. Modifications to area navigation were introduced in April, for example, while phased changes in the route structure began last October, continued with the Swiss/French restructure in February. A third phase is scheduled this year.
One of these projects will increase upper airspace capacity by around 20% at a stroke. In 2002, the reduced vertical separation minima (RVSM) will cut the required separation between aircraft flying between 29,000ft (8,850m) and 41,000ft, and from 2,000ft to 1,000ft.
The RVSM project will be welcomed because it will increase the number of aircraft in the sky at any one time. But the aircraft still have to be managed first by an air traffic management system that is under pressure from airlines to deliver aircraft on time, and then by a series of fragmented ATC centres, some of which, if the first quarter of this year is anything to go by, are close to their capacity limits.
Critics say that, with the exception of RVSM, these upgrades will squeeze out of the system 1% of new capacity here, 2% there. What is lacking is a co-ordinated plan to restructure Europe's airspace into the most efficient system possible. "It all comes down to the idea of cohesive capacity planning, but to do this, we need a strong regulatory body with much stronger powers than exist at the moment," says Hogge.
Change of mind
This would take a major change of political culture in Europe. "What you need to do is empower Eurocontrol, but it will take a critical change of mind for this to happen because of the nationalist view of 'our airspace'," he adds
Each country is responsible for the airspace above its own territory, with the exception of one or two small areas. As soon as an aircraft crosses the boundaries of one country, it becomes the responsibility of the next one.
It was only with the introduction of Eurocontrol's central flow management unit (CFMU) that there began to be a more determined look at ATC in Europe. Yet three years after the CFMU began its work, there is still no overall plan.
"It is not the temporary setbacks caused by human resources or other operational problems within the ATC units which are doing most damage," said Heinrich Beder, chairman of the Airspace Users Group in a letter to the German transport minister. "The real problem is the absence of a uniform European air traffic management system."
Separately, individual states are confronted by domestic problems that confuse the picture. In France and Switzerland, for example, inflexible allocation of airspace for military purposes restricts civil air traffic. Switzerland and Spain also suffer from having too few ATC personnel.
Also, with all the ATC-bashing, it is easy to lose sight of the inefficiencies of airports and airlines that add to ATC problems. Dirk Duytschaever, Eurocontrol's CFMU director, says airlines must share some of the blame for the problems in ATC. "Airlines will say that we have not provided enough capacity in line with the rise in demand. We accept that. But many of the deadlines that Eurocontrol tries to co-ordinate with ATC providers and airlines are not being met."
The reason for this, continues Duytschaever, is that Eurocontrol has no authority to compel the ATC providers or the airlines to do their side of the deal. To begin with, he says, airlines and airports do not always respect their slot times. "The airports and airlines are treating slot times loosely and what is the result? A controller in Karlsruhe is confronted with overload and blames the CFMU for not managing his loads."
Airlines can also shoulder the blame for a lack of co-ordination in planning their departure times, he says. "They will schedule a flight for 8.00, knowing they cannot take off then because there are seven other flights leaving at the same time. The airlines then rely on the CFMU to get them a slot and then to sort the ATC out. All this causes delays which go into statistics, which are then used by the airlines to say how bad the service provision is."
Political will
It seems clear that Eurocontrol needs some teeth, and the political will to back it up. There are some signs that this may be starting to happen.
The EC is negotiating with Eurocontrol to become a full member under the basic premise of using its legal clout to enforce the decisions made by Eurocontrol. Such a move would eventually, in theory, make a Eurocontrol decision binding on the EU's 15 member states, the ATC service providers and the airlines. "Eurocontrol should be able to make binding decisions for its contracting parties that include airspace management. And such decisions should be binding on states," says the EC's Probst.
It is not only the bureaucrats in Europe that are waking up to the ATC crisis. At the European transport ministers' meeting in Luxembourg in mid- June, ATC problems were on the agenda.
The worry is, however, that this is just another discussion panel and that no substantive action will result because of the lack of political will to establish a pan-European body with powers of sanction.
"We need real commitment by states to show they will allow airspace to be restructured internationally and enforce the rules applicable in their own states," says Hogge. "It comes down to the willingness of states and people to do it." n
Secondary radar, France (right). More than 80% of all delays last year were caused by insufficient capacity in air traffic control.
| European airport punctuality league table | ||||
| First Quarter 1999 | ||||
|
| Departures | Arrivals | ||
| % of flights | Average | % of flights | Average | |
| Airport | Delayed (>15 mins) | Delay (mins) | Delayed (>15 mins) | Delay (mins) |
| Milan M'pnsa | 56% | 48 | 53% | 44 |
| Geneva | 39% | 47 | 47% | 44 |
| Munich | 36% | 45 | 45% | 48 |
| Oslo | 34% | 48 | 48% | 47 |
| Rome | 33% | 45 | 45% | 46 |
| Amsterdam | 32% | 43 | 43% | 50 |
| Paris CDG | 32% | 44 | 44% | 43 |
| Madrid | 32% | 45 | 45% | 42 |
| Lisbon | 31% | 48 | 48% | 55 |
| Zurich | 31% | 44 | 44% | 41 |
| Frankfurt | 30% | 38 | 38% | 41 |
| Barcelona | 29% | 47 | 47% | 46 |
| Milan Linate | 29% | 48 | 48% | 56 |
| Paris Orly | 28% | 42 | 42% | 40 |
| Brussels | 28% | 40 | 40% | 42 |
| Helsinki | 26% | 41 | 41% | 43 |
| Manchester | 25% | 42 | 42% | 42 |
| Stockholm | 24% | 42 | 42% | 43 |
| Copenhagen | 23% | 45 | 45% | 44 |
| London Heathrow | 22% | 43 | 43% | 42 |
| Istanbul | 21% | 47 | 47% | 46 |
| London Gatwick | 21% | 37 | 37% | 42 |
| Düsseldorf | 20% | 43 | 43% | 41 |
| Vienna | 20% | 45 | 45% | 43 |
| Athens | 19% | 50 | 50% | 48 |
| Dublin | 14% | 44 | 44% | 45 |
| Larnaca | 14% | 75 | 75% | 67 |
Source: Association of European Airlines
| European ATC delays by control centre 1998 | |||
| Area control centre | % of total traffic handled | ATFM delays % of total | Performance gap % points |
| London | 8% | 13% | -5% |
| Athens | 2% | 10% | -8% |
| Reims | 4% | 9% | -5% |
| Paris | 6% | 8% | -2% |
| Marseilles | 4% | 5% | -1% |
| Zurich | 4% | 5% | -1% |
| Geneva | 3% | 5% | -2% |
| Amsterdam | 3% | 5% | -2% |
| Milan | 3% | 5% | -2% |
| Madrid | 3% | 4% | -1% |
| Top 10 | 40% | 69% | -29% |
| Others | 60% | 31% | 29% |
| Total | 100% | 100% |
|
Note:ATM-air traffic flow management Performance gap is different between proportion of traffic and proportion of ATFM-related delays Source: Eurocontrol/industry estimates
Source: Airline Business