EFFICIENCY STILL OUT OF REACH

It’s a dogfight in the European skies as intense as any over the Western Front in 1917. The weapons are words rather than machine guns, but the battle to make European air traffic control more efficient by bringing the Single European Sky (SES) program to fruition rumbles on, with few signs of reaching a conclusion.

Airlines blame the air navigation service providers (ANSPs). The ANSPs retort that the carriers have no idea of the effort needed to find agreement between
nations. Both say the air traffic controllers’ trade unions are being obstructive. And everyone agrees there is a lack of political will to make anything happen.

Creating SES was never going to be easy. The potential benefits are considerable in terms of saving time and money, plus reducing emissions. In June 2011, the EU nations submitted their plans to initiate SES to an EU performance review body. In October, an unimpressed European Commission, the EU’s ‘board of directors,’ asked the nations to step up efforts to meet the targets.

On Nov. 25, EC VP-transport affairs Siim Kallas said the latest progress reports on SES “set alarm bells ringing,” warning that “2012 is a make-or-break year for SES. The Commission’s “traffic light” assessment showed “a large majority of member states in the orange or red zones and at risk of not meeting critical targets for 2012.”

There was “serious cause for concern” that two major SES targets would not be met. Just five nations—Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark and Lithuania—were on track to meet targets for both air traffic management costs and capacity/delays for 2012-14. And, except for the Danish/Swedish FAB, all other FABs got an orange or red rating “and give serious cause for concern.”

Kallas hinted that if individual nations did not put their houses in order, the EC could introduce an—unspecified—“more radical solution.”

“Airlines have no other choice now than to rely on the European Commission to remind member states that these targets are legally binding,” said Sylviane Lust, director-general of the International Air Carrier Association (IACA), which represents 29 predominantly European carriers serving the leisure market. IACA felt the targets had been set too low to begin with and had too many escape routes that allowed states to avoid complying.

Airlines’ representative bodies were hopeful that governments would start to push through the necessary changes following April 2010’s volcanic ash incident, when European airspace was severely disrupted by fall-out from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull eruption.

However, according to Ulrich Schulte-Strathaus, secretary-general of the Association of European Airlines, as memories of the disruption faded, so did the sense of urgency among governments. “We’re going to find it very difficult to have the momentum we had in the wake of the ash crisis last year. There was then a general understanding of the huge importance of aviation to the European economy. [The issue] has slipped back into administrative mode,” Schulte-Strathaus said.

“It’s now evident that the ‘Big Three’—France, Germany and the UK—haven’t delivered on their performance targets,” he said. Additionally, several controllers’ unions have threatened strike action over the proposed reforms.

A further factor, he said, is that some ANSPs see themselves not as commercial organizations but infrastructure providers, with a ‘take it or leave it’ attitude to the costs they pass on to airlines.

The Civil Air Navigation Services Organization (CANSO), which represents ANSPs, understandably takes a more nuanced view of the situation. “Yes and no,” said its director of European affairs, Guenter Martis, when asked if he was satisfied with progress toward SES.

“Yes, in terms of what we’ve achieved over the past years as a result of hard work. Blood, sweat and tears is an accurate description. We’re extremely engaged.”

However, they have not been able to make the level of progress they wished for because of several “typically European” issues, he admitted.  These include overly nationalistic thinking by many players and the inability of the whole aviation sector to provide “a single, coordinated opinion to decision-makers.”

Sovereignty has been used as an excuse by some countries to move slowly in creating FABs, he said. CANSO has proved this need not be an obstacle but now it is a case of getting civil and military ANSPs, plus their supervisory authorities, around the table to reach an agreement. The problems in doing so should not be underestimated: “It’s difficult enough for two states to agree on this but some FABs have up to eight or nine members.”

The situation is made more complex by the strength of trade unions, some of which have used the emergence of SES to demand improvements in their working agreements that are divorced from reality, says Martis.

Controllers fear job losses and deteriorating working conditions. In fact, the transition from old to new ATC technology will probably require more controllers, not fewer, he believes. While he accepts that 15-20 years hence, automated systems will take on some ATC routing tasks, he believes that controllers’ jobs will change, rather than disappear.

Luc Tytgat, Eurocontrol director-Single Sky, agrees that “social dialogue” will be required to iron out surpluses or shortages of controllers in particular locations, with some perhaps having to move locations to retain their jobs.

He said talks are also needed to bring Europe’s militaries into the equation, and decide which of the continent’s many closed military airspace blocks are released for civil use. These blocks result in considerable course deviations for civil airliners, he said.

The designation in summer 2011 of Eurocontrol as ‘network manager’ for Europe’s ATC network—designed to co-ordinate the FAB structure—is difficult for some sovereignty-conscious nations to accept, he said, but the new role will give a different perspective from those of individual nations trying to optimize their airspace with purely local considerations in mind. His personal view is that Eurocontrol’s network manager role must be granted more power to facilitate integration of the nine FABs.

He, too, believes that governments must incentivize their ANSPs to get the FABs up and running.

According to AEA’s Schulte-Strathaus, “There’s an unholy alliance between the lack of political will at the national level, together with the management of some ANSPs and unions, to slow down the creation of SES.”

He also fears that SES funding will become increasingly problematical as Europe’s sovereign debt crisis leads to reduced government budgets and sweeps other topics off governments’ radar screens.

As a result, AEA is lobbying Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), Schulte-Strathaus said, reminding them of the chaos that descended on European airspace during 2010’s Icelandic volcanic eruption. 

IACA’s Lust believes there must be sanctions to force states and ANSPs into action. She suggests that, ultimately, the EU should remove ANSPs’ licenses for non-compliance with performance targets.

Despite all the problems, CANSO’s Martis remains optimistic, but says more effort is required from the various parties: “We really should sit together, decide where we want to go—and then just do it.”

The Single European Sky project (SES) aims to reform Europe’s fragmented air traffic control (ATC) system—still largely based around national airspace boundaries—into nine multi-national Functional Airspace Blocks (FABs) that will cover the upper airspace over the continent.

Potential advantages: a reduction in bureaucracy, lower costs for airlines and reduced emissions as airliners ply more direct routes.

The last of these considerations becomes more significant from Jan. 1, 2012 when the controversial European Union (EU) Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) comes into effect, effectively a tax on the amount of pollution airliners emit. Official figures from the European Commission and Eurocontrol, the European organization responsible for the safety of air navigation, predict that airlines could reduce their carbon footprints (and thus ETS costs) by 12% if European airspace management was more efficient.

The present system covering the 27 EU nations plus Norway and Switzerland, largely consisting of state-owned air navigation service providers, means ATC costs in Europe are roughly double those of the US.