Europe’s states are faced with approving new ways of managing their skies. Will governments be up to the challenge?

The resolution of those states that approved wholeheartedly the concept of the Single European Sky (SES) is now going to be tested. If the first hurdle in the race was approval, the second is redesigning Europe’s airspace according to air traffic management (ATM) functionality rather than sovereignty.

That may sound simple, but it is more complex in political, legal and industrial terms than many governments realise. While it will be ATM professionals who will advise on how best to structure Europe’s airspace, it will be state governments, with their legal advisers, who will have to approve it. This will require pragmatism, compromise and wisdom. If those are lacking, the SES will operate below its potential efficiency levels as its structural design will be based on considerations other than safety and optimal ATM.

Eurocontrol has just presented to the European Commission its “FAB [functional airspace block] mandate final report”. The SES is intended to be built of upper airspace sectors known as FABs. The report acknowledges the difficulties their design and approval might present, and suggests courses of action by which these might be handled.

But if, in practice, individual block design is too heavily influenced by national interest or political considerations, then the whole single sky scheme will have fallen at the second fence. At present Europe does not have FABs, it has PABs – political airspace blocks – and this is precisely what it is trying to escape from. Although European states clearly recognise that there is a benefit for everybody in more efficient ATM, what will their governments do if there is a perceived loss involved in accepting proposed new blocks that redesign the way the traffic in the skies over their countries is managed? The “loss” might take the form of closing an area control centre (ACC), or at least a decision that the centre should cede control of the area’s upper airspace to another centre, possibly in a neighbouring country. This might raise issues about loss of jobs and skills.

Another change some governments might find it difficult to cope with is that the formula for calculating who benefits from the user charges in their sovereign airspace will have to be radically changed. If the result is a perceived loss of revenue to the country or to its government, or a perception that neighbouring states get a better deal out of the redesign, will they push for an airspace redesign which gives them more revenues?

Finally, in some cases national law may have to be changed if there is any assumption written into it that ATM in sovereign airspace must be carried out directly by a government agency. The International Civil Aviation Organisation treaty says that states are responsible for ensuring that safe, efficient ATM is provided in their sovereign airspace, but it does not require that the state itself should be the air navigation service provider (ANSP). Meanwhile, liability is becoming an issue in places where once it was not. States may avoid direct liability in law in that they may not normally be sued, but if ANSPs become corporatised or even privatised, the legal picture changes. And what is the liability of a state if a “foreign” ANSP, whether state-operated, corporatised or privatised, has the task of providing ATM in its sovereign airspace, and makes a mistake leading to an accident? Or vice-versa. The legal list goes on.

For those who thought the challenge of increasing the safe, efficient capacity of Europe’s skies in the future was going to be assured by the provision of ever-smarter technology, the truth should now dawn that even ATM computers of the future will be hobbled by demands that their algorithms should be written to cope with traffic flows that comply with nationalistic political requirements rather than pure ATM functionality.

Meanwhile, there is no one perfect airspace structure for an efficient SES. There is room for negotiation. But while those negotiations are taking place, at the forefront of the minds of the decision-makers should be the benefit that will flow to all the single sky states from an optimum ATM system. If user charge shares are seen as an issue, they should remember that in inefficient skies the amount of traffic will remain relatively lower, thus directly reducing revenues. Finally, inefficient ATM means more fuel used per journey, more time wasted, more operating expense and more pollution. A well-designed Single European Sky is the only kind worth having. If the SES falls at the second hurdle, it might as well stay where it is.

Source: Flight International

Topics