In documenting a sorry year for European air traffic management (ATM) - so far - the independent Performance Review Commission (PRC) has nevertheless thrown the industry more than a few crumbs of comfort. There is considerable latent traffic capacity, it says, which is waiting to be released, and all that needs to be done is to restructure the airspace.
Eurocontrol will not have been told anything by this excellent report that it did not already know - except perhaps the precise figures qualifying ATM-caused delay - but with its lack of executive power it does not hold the key to making better use of airspace. Neither are money and technology the primary keys to releasing this potential capacity. What is needed is a change in national political attitudes. Structuring airspace with regard to efficiency and safety rather than national borders can eliminate, in the short and medium term at least, most of the ATM capacity shortfall from which Europe suffers.
This is not wishful thinking. The report documents the improvements achieved already by relatively limited airspace restructuring in France and Switzerland this year, and forecasts a potential for capacity increases of 30% in German and Franco/Swiss airspace just by air route network (ARN) restructuring alone. Central and Eastern Europe, critical for en-route traffic between north-western Europe and the Middle East or South-East Asia, could handle an extra 10% of traffic by ARN restructuring.
Road and rail traffic faces no restrictions to movement within the European Union. We have argued before that, for a region which has largely abolished borders on the ground, to maintain them in the air does not make sense.
What inefficient airspace structuring does, however, is to create delay - 42 million minutes of ATM-related delay for aircraft in the skies over the European Civil Aviation Conference countries in 1999, says the PRC. This delay translates into business and commercial inefficiency for travellers. It means higher costs for the airlines, which are passed on to travellers. It means artificially high fuel usage, which flies in the face of everything that Europe is trying to do for the environment and ecology.
Also, a more efficient ARN is fundamentally a simpler one. As the PRC report says, the latent traffic capacity could be released without the need to hire more controllers, yet without placing higher loads on the controllers who would be handling the less complex traffic flows.
Eurocontrol and the PRC sensibly call for a European Airspace Policy Commission (APC) by mid-2000. But the APC will be useless unless it is heeded by national governments.
Source: Flight International
