It looks as if the long-awaited Single European Sky is about to enter existence almost unnoticed.

But maybe that's the way it should be, or at least the way it has to be. The executive director of the SESAR Joint Undertaking, Patrick Ky, promises that the first service improvements - what SESAR calls the "first release" of measures - will be in place by the end of the year.

Airline passengers will not notice the difference, but pilots will, on those routes or city pairs that involve the use of new techniques and procedures. However, many will be accustomed to some of the elements of the new SESAR deliverables, like continuous descent approaches into airport terminal areas, because airlines have been co-operating in the trials for years.

Crowded Airport
 © Rex Features
There is congestion above airports, too

To begin with, only a few will be flying routes using a four-dimensional trajectory, one of the cornerstones of air traffic management's future. These involve a contract with airports at both ends and air navigation service providers in between, with the aircraft navigating not merely a two-dimensional route but a 4D trajectory to pass each waypoint at a predetermined time and meet required times of arrival at the runway and stand.

In the manufacturers' view, aircraft have been capable of this kind of precise 4D navigation for a couple of decades, but the air navigation service providers have not been ready, and most still are not. But the gentle introduction of new techniques gives the whole system - both its technical and its human components - time to shake down and gain confidence before ramping up to full capacity.

There are obstacles to progress, and the most intractable are not technical or operational, nor volcanic ash or heavy snowfall, but social and political. Maurice Georges, chief executive of French provider DSNA, showed the ATC Global conference in Amsterdam last week that traffic lost in French airspace owing to industrial action by air traffic management staff was greater than that lost when the Icelandic volcano shrouded Europe in ash, grounding everything for a week.

Eurocontrol director general David McMillan cites the "social tensions" created by the need for change as a major barrier. And of course ATM cannot solve the problems of capacity shortage at Europe's major hub airports. Tarmac may not be high-tech, but a lack of it will determine the limits of what the total system can deliver.

Matthew Baldwin, the new director of the EC's air transport directorate, described what is at stake here: Europe's prosperity. It's as fundamental as that.

Source: Flight International

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