Eurocontrol's Council has approved measures to increase air traffic capacity in Europe this summer and cope with potential capacity shortfalls between 2002 and 2005.
At its 16 July meeting, the council approved the process for enhancing co-operation between area control centres (ACCs) to improve traffic flow. Eurocontrol has already established a capacity enhancement team to increase capacity at the ACC and sector troublespots. Some 15 sectors - 3% of the total - contributed 45% of en route delays last year.
The council is also pushing for airspace over the former Yugoslavia to return to full civilian use. The Kosovo crisis accounted for 30% of air traffic control (ATC) delays in the first five months of the year. Eurocontrol is working with the military and the regional states to restructure the airspace.
To prepare for potential capacity shortfalls during 2002-5, Eurocontrol is planning to re-run the future air traffic management (ATM) profile model once it receives the states' capacity enhancement plans, requested by the end of July. Potential problems have been identified in the upper airspace of northern Italy, Switzerland and France, and into Spain. Eurocontrol has established a task force with the nations and their air traffic service providers to improve capacity.
Meanwhile, Eurocontrol warns that operators not equipped to meet the 8.33kHz channel-spacing requirement from 7 October will be operationally penalised by being forced to operate in lower airspace, below flight level 245 - 24,500ft (7,500m). The 8.33kHz implementation will free additional radio frequencies to meet increasing ATM demands. Eurocontrol estimates that "close to 90%" of operators will meet the requirement, but, for the measure to be effective, 95% need to be equipped. Although the deadline will remain, Eurocontrol senior director Wolfgang Philipp predicts: "Some transition period will probably be introduced as the equipage rate is still lower than anticipated."
• The US Air Transport Association (ATA) has called for the US Department of Transportation to change the way it reports delays to reflect more accurately the cause of late flights.
"Passengers need to know how many delays are the fault of an airline and how many are the fault of an inefficient ATC system," says the ATA.
In April, US ATC delays were up by 51% from the same month a year earlier, and up by 37% in May. James Goodwin, chairman and chief executive of United Airlines, says the US Federal Aviation Administration must expedite ATC system modernisation because of "the chronic air traffic delays".
Source: Flight International
