The swarms of brightly painted budget aircraft flying over Europe are busier, cheaper and more plentiful than ever. But they are creating a painful headache for air traffic controllers, who face a challenge in coping with skies packed with a record number of flights.
At the present rate of growth Europe’s skies will become ”full” in little more than a decade, with current procedures unable to cope, according to Europe’s top air traffic controller.
The warning is set to reopen fierce controversy over the safety of the continent’s congested skies. It comes days ahead of the publication of an official report which is likely to blame failures in air traffic control for one of the most devastating air disasters in European history — a mid-air collision over Lake Constance two years ago which claimed 71 lives.
National control centres across the continent are coordinated by a network run by a Brussels-based agency, Eurocontrol, which matches take-off and landing slots in 33 countries stretching from Ireland to Ukraine. In a typical 24-hour period, Eurocontrol looks after 29 000 flights. Despite a slowdown in air travel following the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, it predicts that annual traffic across Europe will double to 16-million aircraft by 2020.
Victor Aguado, director general of Eurocontrol, said last week: ”In the middle of the next decade, we will reach capacity using the present systems. Beyond that, we’ll need something else, which today’s technology can’t provide.”
To cope with booming numbers of flights, the minimum height separation between aircraft has already been cut from 609 metres to 304 metres.
Safety experts are now working towards ”self-separation” technology that will limit the role of controllers by improving electronic equipment allowing aircraft to set safe paths away from each other automatically.
At any daytime moment, there are 3 500 aircraft in the skies over Europe, carrying some 400 000 people. One in 10 of them is operated by low-cost airlines, which have come from nowhere to create a booming industry over the last decade.
To the consternation of experts, much of the growth is forecast to come from east European states, where budget airlines are looking for new destinations. Safety chiefs have warned that the quality of air traffic control in Europe’s new member states is variable.
Erik Merckx, Eurocontrol’s head of safety enhancement, said: ”If we don’t get these new states up to speed, with the increasing traffic levels we’re predicting, we will have a problem.”
No-frills revolution
Ireland and Britain led the way in the no-frills revolution through Ryanair and EasyJet, which are well established as the top two low-cost carriers in Europe. Scores of also-rans have entered the market, including nine budget airlines based in Germany alone.
Next month a Hungarian carrier, Wizz, will enter the battle, offering flights from Luton airport to Budapest and Katowice, in Poland.
While annual growth in traffic is set to be a modest 3% in Britain and 2,9% in France, a proliferation of services is forecast to increase flights over Ukraine by 7%, over Belarus by 5,5%, over Turkey by 5,9% and over Bulgaria by 5%.
Eurocontrol reckons six states have safety management below ”acceptable” levels, although it declines to name them. While Britain’s air traffic control scores more than 95% for safety and maturity, three countries languish below 20%.
Unions warn that progress could be tough as free movement of labour within the enlarged European Union allows experienced controllers to move west in search of better paid vacancies.
Shane Enright, aviation secretary of the International Transport Workers’ Federation, said: ”There’s a Europe-wide shortage of controllers. There needs to be harmonisation of pay and conditions, otherwise these new member states are going to lose out.”
Cost pressures are tight: no-frills carriers are reluctant to pay anything they can avoid for air traffic control. Ryanair’s outspoken boss, Michael O’Leary, last year accused safety authorities of building ”marble palaces” for their staff rather than providing the basic service needed.
Swiss air traffic control said last week that four near misses occurred in its airspace in April alone. A close shave between an Iberia passenger plane and a business jet over Zurich could have had ”disastrous consequences”, according to Switzerland’s NZZ am Sonntag newspaper.
The Swiss, who handle a key corridor for aircraft passing over the heart of the continent, will come under further pressure on Wednesday. German investigators are due to publish the results of a two-year examination of the Uberlingen disaster, in which a DHL freight aircraft crashed into a charter flight packed with Russian schoolchildren.
The accident is expected to be blamed on mistakes by Peter Nielsen, a controller working the night shift at an inadequately staffed Swiss control centre. Nielsen was stabbed to death in February by a grieving Russian father who lost his wife and two children in the crash.
The Uberlingen crash was Europe’s third fatal accident in three years caused by errors in air traffic control. It followed collisions on the ground at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport in 2000 and Milan’s Linate airfield in 2001. The sequence ended a 16-year run without any deaths.
Eurocontrol admits it is concerned about the trend. Aguado said: ”It worries us a lot when we see two accidents on runways in successive years and a mid-air collision — which is something which Europe has not experienced for many years.”
It is working on a new system which will give controllers an 18-minute warning of any potential collision, rather than the present two to three minutes.
At present, one in 10-million flights ends with an accident caused by air traffic control. But in the constant congestion at 9 144 metres predicted by 2020, that rate could mean two disasters in Europe’s skies a year. – Guardian Unlimited Â