Eurocontrol says current airspace alliances are not providing expected benefits
The value of functional airspace blocks, which a year ago were being promoted as the fundamental airspace design components that would make the Single European Sky (SES) efficient, is being questioned.
Eurocontrol director general Victor Aguado says that the joint airspace blocks now being formed by alliances between neighbouring air navigation service providers (ANSP) such as those in Ireland and the UK, and Denmark and Sweden, are not providing the predicted levels of benefit in efficiency terms.
And David McMillan, director general of civil aviation at the UK's Department for Transport, says that although it was always clear that overcoming political, cultural and industrial obstacles to create multinational functional airspace blocks controlled by one ANSP was going to be difficult, building a business case for the change and coping with the legal liability issues looks as if it may make the blocks impractical.
McMillan warned the ATC Maastricht 2007 conference last week that the resulting slow rate of change might mean the European Commission, under the SES legislation, could try to impose functional airspace blocks "from the top down" rather than letting them evolve from the bottom. "Those in favour of the bottom-up approach had better get their skates on" to make the system work, he said.
Civil Air Navigation Service Organisation (CANSO) head Alexander ter Kuile, however, says the top-down imposition of functional airspace blocks would not work because the SES legislation would not confer that power on the EC in the face of national government opposition.
"We are in the second stage of the SES process," says ter Kuile. "With maturity has come the realisation that the SES legislation has exceeded the Commission's authority."
Another practical matter relating to functional airspace blocks is that, as the SES evolves, blocks designed for optimum efficiency for predicted levels and patterns of traffic may well need redesigning by the time they come into operation - and the longer the process takes the more likely that would be, ter Kuile says.
A similar warning about taking too long to plan both Europe's SES and the USA's next-generation transport system (NGATS) comes from Sita's director of cockpit communications service Philip Clinch, who says that "if you look too far into the future, you risk spending money on systems that will never get implemented".
NGATS and the SES preparation programme SESAR should stop looking to 2025 and focus on implementing what will be needed by 2013, says Clinch.
Source: Flight International
