European air traffic management (ATM) costs 70% more per unit of production than the US system, reveals the Eurocontrol Performance Review Commission (PRC) report for 2001.
The method of determining user charges must be changed, says the Commission, because the present system gives air traffic service providers no incentive to improve efficiency. If traffic drops, the service providers can raise unit charges and most are permitted to do so with no requirement to seek savings, the PRC points out.
The Commission also blames the inefficiency on other factors, the main one being that there are so many small providers acting as national units. This is "fragmentation" and the PRC says it robs providers of economies of scale.
The other major problem, according to the report, is that each nation sets aside military airspace that is inefficiently positioned in system-wide terms, and the standard of co-ordination between military and civil air traffic controllers varies from country to country.
The PRC notes the lack of accounting transparency in most European providers and says there should be "clear accountability and responsibility, performance objectives, autonomy, effective incentives, and defined rights and roles for stakeholders."
The Commission has revised its traffic forecasts downward dramatically since 2000 when it anticipated 19% growth between 2000 and 2003. Given that "the strong traffic growth over the last seven years will virtually have stopped for two years in 2001 and 2002", the PRC now estimates that the traffic levels predicted for 2003 will only be reached in 2007.
Airspace restructuring to bring capacity gains in 2001 "came too late to have a strong influence on summer delays", says the report. En-route ATM delays, at 3.1min/flight, were above the target of 2.8min and cost users an estimated €1.1-1.7 billion ($1.1-1.7 billion).
The PRC says safety objectives can best be achieved by setting up a system of non-punitive reporting, and a central or networked incident database that will allow "key risk areas" to be identified and prevention measures put in place. But "most of the states who have responded to the survey offer neither total nor partial immunity to those reporting safety occurrences", the report says.
Source: Flight International
