The Outlook For European Air Traffic Congestion Is Not Bright

European airlines, trade unions and air traffic control (ATC) bodies fear that shortages of ATC capacity over the continent will continue for the foreseeable future.

Factors including a lack of new controllers, failure of ATC organizations to rebuild capacity post-pandemic, and new airspace training requirements for the latest military aircraft, may combine to make reducing ATC delays challenging.

Last October’s annual report of the European Union’s Single European Sky (SES) Performance Review Body (PRB) showed there was a 400% increase in the average delay per flight.

Airline lobbying group Airlines for Europe (A4E) said the report documented a continued failure of member states to meet agreed performance plans for European airspace. A4E added the situation was unlikely to improve anytime soon as the PRB had repeated a 2022 recommendation that states need to take action now to avoid future capacity gaps.

Doing so may be difficult, as the aviation industry no longer holds the attraction it once did for young recruits, A4E policy director Achim Baumann said.

“It’s a general issue with aviation that the perception of aviation has changed; recruiting is not as easy,” he said. “ATCOs [air traffic control officers] are a problem because they combine the shift work of unskilled workers with the stress of a pilot. Yes, they’re well-paid, but the problem of dwindling numbers of ATCOs is still there.”

He said there was confusion about staffing levels. “People aren’t sure if we don’t have enough controllers, or too many, or the right amount. If we take Europe as a whole, we’re possibly close to where we should be, but—and it’s a big but—they’re not necessarily where they should be.”

This meant that in some cases, “ATCOs are twiddling their thumbs, while others are working their backsides off,” Baumann said.

AIR TRAFFIC SHIFTS

Part of the problem has been caused by shifting patterns of airline traffic, the most obvious of which stems from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. With airspace over Russia, Ukraine and Belarus out of bounds to western carriers, traffic flows have moved west and south. Poland, on the edge of the conflict zone, has seen a drop in en route traffic, whereas Hungary, Romania and Germany have recorded increases.

But the underlying problems remain skill shortages and a lack of applicants, Baumann said. Air navigation service providers (ANSPs) are seeing experienced personnel retire or leave the industry and are unable to backfill those positions with new recruits.

Baumann’s comments are at least partly backed up by the European Transport Workers Federation’s air traffic management (ATM) committee chairman, Gauthier Sturtzer.

“Overall in Europe, we estimate we are lacking 800 controllers to cope with the traffic,” he said.

“We could have used COVID to catch up with the staff shortage,” Sturtzer argued. However, as ANSPs experienced a sudden and severe drop in income during the pandemic through reduced en route fees, they cut back on the training of new recruits. That training pipeline has now restarted, Sturtzer said, but there is a gap of two years’ worth of new personnel,  and that cohort will take years to replace, if ever.

Training organizations are now at full stretch and “we won’t be able to catch up with training, not in the current decade,” Sturtzer said.

In addition, ATCOs who were made redundant, were furloghed or who left the industry have proved to be difficult to attract back, he said.

The solution to staffing problems? Long-term planning to bring in the right quality and quantity of new personnel, Sturtzer said, although he accepted that uncertainties in the income of ANSPs in the short term made this difficult.

IATA also expressed concern about the way the situation is developing.

“Eurocontrol statistics from summer 2023 tell the story about how bad the situation is,” IATA regional director, operations, safety and security, Giancarlo Buono told ATW. Eurocontrol oversees ATC operations in some 40 European countries.

“Although there is less traffic than 2019 in the network, delays have been much higher. Staffing remains the major issue with regards to the available capacity. Modernization of training of ATCOs, as well as new harmonized European Union licensing requirements, are required to ensure we will have the necessary resources to meet the traffic demand,” he said.

“We are working with EASA to ensure the above is achieved; we are working with the [Eurocontrol] network manager to understand the bottlenecks and propose long-term strategic—not only tactical—solutions; and we are continuously consulting with ANSPs and states to ensure that their performance plans take into consideration the realistic traffic demand and the resulting ATCOs staffing requirements.”

Buono disagreed with Sturtzer on the underlying cause of personnel shortages.

“COVID is being used now as the excuse,” he said. “Yes, some training and recruitment was delayed, but [ANSPs] have the means to solve these issues. For the past two years the biggest offenders are France (system implementation and strikes) and Germany (some system implementation but mostly structural staffing issues in Karlsruhe).

“No ATCO staff were let go during or after COVID; instead they received more or less full benefits and pay while keeping their positions. There are bottlenecks and neighboring states have to take up the slack, some of which are already at +20% on 2019 [traffic levels] due to the situation in Ukraine.”

He was pessimistic about the near future: “Unfortunately, the picture for 2024 is no better,” he said, pointing out that France mandated 17,000 cancellations over 12 weeks from January so the Paris area control center can implement a new system, and delays and reroutes will be a feature. In Germany there is still no solution for 2024.

The European Regions Airline Association (ERA), representing more than 55 carriers, agrees with IATA’s gloomy assessment: “The prognosis for 2024 is unfortunately more of the same,” ERA head of operations, air safety and infrastructure Nick Rhodes said.

Using Eurocontrol’s FATHOM tool, which provides insights into members’ ATM performance, in the year to Dec. 1, 2023, ERA members operated 4.3% more flights, but ATC delays increased 42.7%, to more than 1.8 million minutes.

Although 20% of the network is unavailable due to the conflict in Ukraine, on the whole, this has had a limited impact for the majority of our operators,” Rhodes said. “En route delays in France (Paris, Marseille and Reims ACC) accounted for nearly a quarter of all ATC delays suffered by ERA members , with ATC strikes a significant contributing factor, alongside constraints related to the deployment of ATC system upgrades.

“Capacity problems in German airspace also featured highly, with the Karlsruhe area continuing to generate a high level of delay for our members. On the ground, Amsterdam, Lisbon and Copenhagen airports have created major arrival punctuality delays with ATC staffing and adverse weather being the main drivers of delay.”

ERA meets regularly with the Civil Air Navigation Services Organization (CANSO), ANSPs and the Eurocontrol network manager to discuss ATC challenges.

“We understand that staffing issues are not quickly remedied, with maintaining the pipeline of new talent across all facets of the industry a big challenge,” Rhodes said. “It should be noted that the majority of ANSPs deliver a good service. The main problems occur within a small number of states, but these states are in the core of Europe, where the highest demand has always existed, and the impacts and costs of delays is significant.”

COMPLEX AIRSPACE

Meanwhile, CANSO says that while it understands A4E’s focus on the PRB statistic of a 400% rise in delays, there are many other factors to consider.

“There’s a lot more to it. It’s always been a challenge in such a complex airspace as Europe, which is very busy and had a growing amount of traffic before COVID and the Ukraine war. In some cases, yes, there’s a lack of capacity,” CANSO manager, Europe policy and advocacy, Johnny Pring said, adding that the entire aviation sector was still in recovery mode from the pandemic.

Expected revenue levels plummeted during the pandemic and have still not recovered, he said. Because of the nature of ATC, it was not possible during the pandemic to mothball assets in the way that airlines and airports could, and training was one of the few areas where ANSPs could cut their costs.

Training during the pandemic “just wasn’t possible because of social distancing rules” and ANSPs “are still playing catch-up from that,” Pring said.

He also warned that ANSPs face a wave of retirements over the coming decade—“not just ATCOs but air safety engineers who deal with the electronics and maintain all the infrastructure.”

It takes up to three years to train an ATCO, and, once qualified, they are trained for a particular geographical area, so cannot easily be moved to areas where shortages might exist. Pring echoed the comments of A4E’s Baumann that aviation generally is now a less attractive option for young people, reducing the pool of potential ATC applicants.

While it is difficult to get statistics, talks with CANSO members, European trade union groups and professional staff associations all suggest that a recruitment problem exists, he said.

One technical method for easing congestion in Europe’s skies is the adoption of free route airspace, which gives pilots much greater flexibility in plotting their courses between entering one country’s aerial border and leaving it, rather than being confined to traditional air corridors.

These more direct routings could save substantial amounts of time and are scheduled to be rolled out fully by CANSO’s European member states by the end of 2025. There is also an ambition for free route airspace that will traverse national boundaries.

Another way of freeing up more airspace and reducing congestion is to make greater use of airspace traditionally blocked off for military use.

For example, several nations have an approach to this dual-use airspace that can be summarized as being “as civil as possible, as military as needed.”

However, this approach in several European nations may be adversely affected by the introduction of latest-generation fighter aircraft, such as the Lockheed Martin F-35 and Dassault Rafale F4, which need larger blocks of airspace to train effectively. Their longer range and higher-performance radar mean that they need airspace areas with dimensions of around 200 nm for the F-35 and 150 nm for the Rafale F4.

While that military element may be a small factor in Europe’s seeming inability to address air traffic congestion and delays, the situation is so vulnerable that small factors quickly add up to chaos.

The overall problem is that Europe’s governments have never gotten behind the technological solutions. As IATA regional VP, Europe, Rafael Schvartzman, said in IATA’s Airlines magazine, ATM in Europe “still suffers from fragmented skies and underinvestment, making delays common especially during the peak summer months. … Service levels are falling even as charges rise.”

Europe’s SES ATM modernization program “continues to suffer from a lack of political will,” Schvartzman said. “It could triple airspace capacity and reduce carbon emissions by up to 10%, but politicians have left these significant gains on the table for over two decades.”