New flight plan for Europe’s skies

Date: 15/07/1999

By Renée Cordes

Passengers stranded at Milan's new Malpensa 2000 airport have invented a new game.

Looking for ways to kill time at the nine-month-old airport which has already acquired the worst punctuality record in Europe, they have started betting which flight will take off next and when. With many flights held up for several hours, the game can go on. And on. And on.

More than half of all departures from the new airport were delayed for more than 15 minutes in the first quarter of this year, with the average flight taking off 47.8 minutes late, according to the Association of European Airlines (AEA). This is despite the fact that Europe's fifth-largest airport has two terminals, two runways and 42 gates equipped to handle 19 million passengers and 700 flights a day - four times the traffic handled by Malpensa's old facility.

Delays are an increasing problem throughout Europe, where demand for air travel is projected to grow by 5% annually for the next ten to 15 years and where opening new airports is the exception rather than the rule. Flight delays cost European businesses an estimated 15 billion euro a year in the mid-1990s, excluding the environmental costs of wasted aircraft fuel.

The problem is compounded at this time of year as holiday-makers flee in droves across borders. The summer of 1999 promises to be the worst ever for several reasons: a greater-than-expected number of travellers; restricted airspace above Yugoslavia in the aftermath of the Kosovo conflict; and stubborn traffic snarls in Switzerland, France, Spain and Italy.

But even before industry insiders began predicting a summer of record delays, pressure had been mounting on EU governments to cede some of their powers over national air traffic control to a centralised body, Eurocontrol, and to let the European Commission negotiate new arrangements on behalf of all 15 member states.

Both sides are confident of reaching agreement by the end of this year, sealing a deal to improve the coordination of Europe's 49 air traffic control centres with 22 different operating systems, 30 computer software and 18 hardware systems. The aim is to ensure more efficient, cheaper and safer travel in the single aviation market in future.

"I am optimistic that we will be able to finalise an agreement by the end of the year," Eurocontrol's director general Yves Lambert told European Voice . "What will be very powerful with the addition of the European Community is the political leverage they have."

Lambert's agency currently has only limited powers to get national air traffic control authorities to implement decisions, and it is often forced to opt for a lowest-common-denominator approach to get agreement from a majority of its members. As a result, Eurocontrol is seen as a poor cousin to the powerful US Federal Aviation Administration, which presides over a unified air-traffic control system on the other side of the Atlantic.

"So long as air traffic control in Europe is fragmented, a poorly performing system in a strategic location can invalidate the quality of service delivered elsewhere," Fausto Cereti, head of the AEA and chairman of Alitalia told industry officials earlier this month.

Eurocontrol hopes that the additional muscle power it is on the verge of acquiring will push national authorities to approve changes such as a plan to halve the required vertical distance between aeroplanes flying between 29,000 and 41,000 feet.

This would require legal action in all 15 EU member states, which would have to introduce national requirements obliging the owners of commercial aircraft to install equipment so that they can fly 1,000 feet above or below other aircraft in the so-called upper airspace rather than 2,000 feet as currently required.

For the past four years, outgoing Transport Commissioner Neil Kinnock has been trying to convince EU governments to make Eurocontrol more efficient by letting the Commission do the talking on their behalf. Last month, transport ministers finally endorsed the move publicly and, for the first time, called for improvements in European air traffic control.

"We proposed substantial changes four years ago that still need to be undertaken. I am dismayed it has taken so long, but the prospects are now better than they were a few years ago," Kinnock told ministers at the June meeting. "A single market in aviation requires a single agency for the management of airspace."

While it will be up to his successor, incoming Spanish Commissioner Loyola de Palacio, to see the plan through, the important groundwork has been laid.

At last month's meeting, ministers also called on the EU executive to draw up a report, expected this autumn, outlining ways to reduce delays based on this summer's experience and to consider publishing regular punctuality reports.

But a coordinated air traffic control system for all of Europe will not be forged overnight.

Thomas Kropp, a spokesman for Deutsche Lufthansa airlines in Brussels, warned that until Helsinki signed an agreement to join Eurocontrol, there was no way that the Commission could join to represent the interests of the EU as a whole. Finland, which has just taken over the Union's six-month rotating presidency, is the only EU country which is not currently a member of the agency.

Lambert is, however, hopeful that talks now underway between Helsinki and Eurocontrol officials will enable a deal to be reached within "the next few months," paving the way for a wider agreement with the Union as a whole.

Meanwhile, Eurocontrol has had to postpone plans to restructure air routes in western Europe for several months, because of concern that making the changes now would place too great a burden on already saturated skies and swamp overworked air traffic controllers during the busiest season of the year.

The full benefits of a plan to ease congestion in Switzerland, France, Spain and Italy which was supposed to be implemented this summer will not now be felt until this autumn or winter.

This summer's extraordinarily high level of congestion in the skies over EU member states will also be due, in part, to the knock-on effects of the Kosovo conflict, as airspace above Yugoslavia is still being heavily used by military aircraft and humanitarian missions.

In addition, travellers who booked their summer holidays when NATO was conducting its air campaign against Serbia did so assuming that the war would still be going on now.

At the end of May, bookings for holidays to the Istrian and Dubrovnik coasts were down by 18% and 30% respectively, with those to Hungarian destinations down by more than 20% in April. The final figures are expected to be even lower, even though the conflict is now over, which means that more planes will be flying to other European destinations such as Spain and Portugal.

The commercial pressure on airlines to ensure their flights take off on time is growing in the face of increasing competition from rival forms of transport such as high-speed trains on short-haul trips. "There just are not any alternatives to flying when you are travelling across the Atlantic, but there are substitutes to many European short-haul domestic flights," said Peter Shackleford of the Madrid-based World Tourism Organisation.

Since the high-speed rail link connecting Madrid to Seville began operating about seven years ago, almost all airlines have stopped offering flights between the two cities. The company running the service, which promises to reimburse passengers if their train arrives more than five minutes late for the 2.5-hour journey, has a 99% punctuality record. "No airline would ever dare to make that kind of promise," said Shackleford.

But punctual air travel may one day be a reality, say industry insiders, especially if more air traffic control authorities follow the UK lead and invite private companies to become partners. "There is a guaranteed revenue stream from air traffic control," said British Airways spokesman Peter Middleton. In other words, potential investors, like travellers, have nothing to lose but time.

*Figures refer to the first quarter of 1999

Source: Association of European Airlines

Major feature.