Guardian: Safety warning as Europe's skies come close to saturation point

Safety warning as Europe's skies come close to saturation point

Rise of budget flights means system will soon be unable to cope

Andrew Clark, transport correspondent
Monday May 17, 2004
The Guardian

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 16m 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 2,000ft to 1,000ft.

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."


rest at:
http://travel.guardian.co.uk/news/st...218438,00.html