CANSO release plans to mitigate capacity restraints over summer 2019

CANSO and its members have announced five measures to improve airspace capacity and reduce delays across Europe in summer 2019.

The measures include air navigation service providers working better together to re-distribute traffic; taking a more Europe-wide rather than national approach to managing traffic and gaining access to airspace normally reserved for military use.

In 2018, European countries saw traffic grow between three and 13 per cent. The unprecedented demand for airspace capacity will persist in 2019. This presents a challenge to an industry where significantly-increasing capacity can take a number of years, due to the long time needed to train air traffic controllers, and where the focus in recent years has been on reducing costs while maintaining high safety standards. ANSPs improved cost efficiency by 15 per cent (unit cost reduction) between 2011 and 2017.

There have been five measures announced to improve the performance of air navigation services across Europe:

1. Collaborative airspace coordination initiative between area control centres that will deliver optimum solutions at regional level rather than individual country level
2. The flexible-use-of-airspace (FUA) concept that will allow civil aircraft to use military airspace when the military do not require it; increasing capacity across Europe 
3. A more network-orientated approach on the application of air traffic flow management (ATFM) under the umbrella of the network manager
4. Creation of three major seamless airspace re-sectorisation projects in three functional airspace blocks: Europe Central, Central-South East Europe and South West Europe 
5. Industrial actions in some European countries caused air traffic delays in summer 2018. ANSPs are continuing their work with social partners to avoid industrial actions to the largest possible extent. When this is not possible, it is expected that full application of the strike notification procedures will be followed to enable appropriate notification to airspace users, as well as preparing and coordinating the necessary network mitigation measures, to ensure business continuity and system resilience.

CANSO Director Europe Affairs, Tanja Grobotek, said: “CANSO members are committed to ensuring record traffic levels are managed as efficiently as possible. While ANSPs have a critical role to play in delivering network performance, airports, airlines and other aviation stakeholders all have an equally-important role to play in a network-centric approach and it is vital that we work together to make best use of the airspace capacity available.

“Looking to the future, it will be important to ensure that the regulatory framework for managing airspace in Europe evolves in a way that encourages and supports greater network-focused behaviours and that, when states develop national performance plans for the next reference periods, they give sufficient consideration to the resources needed to meet growing demands for capacity alongside other performance targets.”