David Learmount/LONDON
All air traffic control services must be liberated from direct governmental control, says the Geneva-based Civil Air Navigation Services Organisation (CANSO), which represents the world's 20 autonomous air traffic services (ATS) providers.
CANSO believes the alternative is that the world's air navigation services will die through lack of investment. CANSO's preferred solution to ATS independence is corporatisation, which can vary for each organisation but must include "moving into a business environment, allowing them to become financially self sufficient and able to fund their own infrastructure investment requirements by borrowing money."
In the report, entitled The Corporatisation of Air Navigation Services, CANSO argues that it is becoming increasingly politically difficult to give ATC priority for government investment compared with, say, social programmes. Where air navigation services are provided by a government organisation, the report points out, their user revenues are often used as funding for other government programmes. "The establishment of corporatised bodies," says the report, "has produced organisations whose only task is the safe and efficient provision of ANS and which are unencumbered by the wide range of responsibilities typical of government departments."
Lending respectability to the argument, International Civil Aviation Organisation president Dr Assad Kotaite says: "A previously unthinkable thing is happening in the world of air navigation services. What used to be considered an untouchable, purely governmental, function is being assigned to authorities having administrative and often even financial autonomy."
Assad hopes that "the improved financing opportunities available to them could speed the process of global implementation of the new, largely satellite-based communications, navigation, and surveillance/air traffic management systems which will add to safety."
Source: Flight International
