It often takes a crisis to unite an industry and push participants into much-needed action. A crisis is exactly what Europe's air traffic control system is facing this summer, and Eurocontrol, Europe's air navigation organisation, freely admits it.
The signs are already there. Last summer's system performance was poor, but Eurocontrol's June traffic figures show daily traffic up and delays rising.
With European traffic traditionally peaking in September, protests of an air traffic control (ATC) crisis this summer from airline associations are not wanton exaggeration.
Put simply, Europe's ATC system does not have the capacity to meet growing demand and will never meet it unless radical changes are implemented now.
For years, airlines have blamed air traffic service (ATS) providers and Eurocontrol for failing to provide enough capacity, and Eurocontrol has been blaming airlines and ATS providers for non-compliance with crucial air traffic management (ATM) programmes. Well behind the front line, Europe's transport ministers have lamented the situation and called for urgent action, meanwhile failing to provide the money that their national ATS providers need to upgrade.
The problem is not a lack of planning or a lack of consensus, it is a lack of will to implement agreed policies. ATS providers do not operate in a vacuum. They are all, in Europe, nationally owned and underfunded. ATC is never a political priority until there is a crisis, such as the last major one at the end of the 1980s when transport ministers saw millions of unhappy voters stranded in airports all over Europe.
Suddenly, 10 years later and faced with another crisis, all players show signs that they might agree the way ahead.
At the top of the list of airline and Eurocontrol requirements to knock Europe's ATC system into shape is a central body with regulatory power. Eurocontrol's Council has, disappointingly, just sidestepped a decision to set up a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) procedure, a primary regulatory tool for ATM policymaking, but it is hoped it will give it the green light in October. Exactly how the agency will be given the authority to enforce ATM decisions is still far from clear, but Eurocontrol is already working on possible contractual arrangements to ensure compliance with agreed objectives and deadlines by member states and their ATS providers.
In the medium-term, capacity improvements will come from airspace reorganisation such as reduced vertical separation minimum (RVSM), which is the largest single programme Eurocontrol has ever embarked on. RVSM, with the creation of six additional flight levels from January 2002, is expected to yield an immediate 20% increase in capacity.
But so far, Eurocontrol's efforts to introduce ATS capacity improvements have been hobbled by its lack of authority to enforce. The implementation of basic area navigation last year, for example, designed to reduce traffic bottlenecks, was postponed twice due to low operator compliance levels, while 8.33kHz radio channel spacing is due for implementation this October following earlier failed attempts. Some European states have yet to meet European Air Traffic Control Harmonisation and Implementation Programme objectives for which the deadline was 1995.
As for the crucial, capacity liberating RVSM, although there is support from participants, Eurocontrol is reluctant to advance the 2002 date without a means to enforce it because of previous failures by states and operators to meet deadlines.
Only revolutionary changes will provide the capacity to cope with expected traffic growth after 2005. Eurocontrol has defined these measures in its ATM-2000+ strategy, but unless it is empowered to ensure their success, Europe's ATC system will never be far from crisis.
Empowering a central agency - Eurocontrol - is essential, but it is not all that is needed. Politicians hold the purse strings of Europe's ATS providers. If governments are not prepared to invest in the future of ATM except in crisis, they should admit it and either privatise or corporatise their national ATS providers.
Source: Flight International
