Air Transport

A sharp downturn in airline traffic in Europe may constitute a threat to efficiency improvements that would benefit the environment, says the Civil Air Navigation Services Organisation (CANSO).

With traffic movements at some European hubs dropping by as much as 10% compared with a year ago, air navigation services providers (ANSP) are seeing their incomes drop, which may make their political masters reluctant to invest in system improvements that could reduce fuel consumption and therefore emissions, CANSO fears.

Airports and lower airspace are experiencing big traffic drops, said CANSO secretary general Alexander ter Kuile in a 9 October presentation at an air traffic management conference on functional airspace blocks organised by HungaroControl in Budapest, but the global economic slowdown has also reduced over-flights. Ter Kuile quotes the UK's NATS as experiencing nearly 2% total traffic drop, Belgocontrol 0.3%, and Spain's AENA 0.6%.

Conference participants released a statement noting "the rapidly changing world economy and its impact on the world's airlines". The statement calls for:

• The earliest possible implementation of the airspace efficiencies foreseen in the Single European Sky.
• Early approval and implementation of Single European Sky Package II.
• A re-evaluation of investment programmes to ensure acceleration of efficiencies and cost benefits that can be secured in the short term and deferral of other investments that are jointly agreed as non-essential at this time.

Airline losses this year are expected to continue, and possibly worsen, in 2009, says CANSO, so all possible benefits from improvements already approved for the early stages of the Single European Sky programme as identified in the SESAR study should be accelerated.

Ter Kuile laments a European obsession with "institutional issues" because ATM in most countries is so close to politics, and pleads for ANSPs to be cleared to implement change. The first, he says, should be speeding gate-to-gate performance by all flights, shortening routes, optimising airspace structures and airport arrival and departure procedures.

There is "low hanging fruit", in terms of routeing efficiency, available to be picked now, says ter Kuile, but it will not be done without a change of attitude that allows "total institutional reform", enabling the optimisation of cross-border airspace by adopting true functional airspace blocks.

At present, ter Kuile told the Budapest meeting, the power to effect real beneficial ATM improvement lies 60% in the hands of government and the military, and only 10% is in the hands of the ANSPs. The remaining 30% depends on successful regional co-ordination programmes, he said.