Will a single European sky solve the problems of air traffic control – and reduce CO2 emissions? | Aviation industry

FAs airlines struggle to reconcile their stated goals of reducing carbon emissions and making billions in profits by carrying ever more passengers, one target has repeatedly become the target of their frustration: the air traffic control services that oversee European skies.

Anger over years of strikes in Europe that had disrupted peak season flight schedules turned to fury this time last year when a glitch in Britain’s National Air Traffic Service (Nats) grounded planes and left airlines paying for the disruption. Another festering ill for airlines is the alleged inefficiency of a system that manages European airspace based on far-flung boundaries.

The chief executive of the continent’s largest travel company, Tui, told the BBC this week that the company had calculated it could avoid 10% of emissions if there was an “effective flight organisation over Europe”. Sebastian Ebel told BBC Radio 4: “It has to be decided that there is one European sky.” Willie Walsh, the boss of airline Iata, has also claimed that a single operator could reduce CO2 emissions.₂ from flying by about 10% “virtually overnight”.

A unified airspace would allow planes to fly more straightforward routes from takeoff to landing. Instead, there is an invisible patchwork of sovereign airspaces under the control of countless national operators. “The US, Canada and Australia are huge areas with a single air traffic control authority. In Europe there are 43,” says Andrew Charlton, the airline’s managing director. by Aviation Advocacy, a Geneva-based consulting firm.

“If the Wright brothers came in with their airplanes today and we decided they shouldn’t collide, I don’t think they would have invented an air traffic control system like this.”

The idea of ​​creating a common airspace is almost as old as the EU itself. It seemed to finally gain momentum a quarter of a century ago, when work began in 2004 on what eventually became legislation to create the Single European Sky (SES). Eurocontrol, an agency created in 1963 to coordinate national air traffic management, was tasked with further integrating services.

A first step towards a single EU sky should have been the creation of functional airspace blocks (FABs). “Instead, however, the states organized themselves into traditional, historical blocks,” said Charlton.

These maps were based on ancient connections rather than flight paths – Britain’s bloc only extended as far as Ireland. “We have different cultures and that’s what makes Europe so fantastic and interesting,” says Charlton. “But I don’t see any reason why that has to happen at 32,000 feet.”

But nation states place security as their top priority and continue to value their sovereignty, particularly over military airspace. A second package of reforms has been slow to progress, partly due to disputes between the UK and Spain over how it should apply to Gibraltar airport.

After Brexit, the EU pushed for a revision of the SES 2+ plan, aiming for closer integration. However, Walsh described an agreement in March this year as a “failure and a dirty deal”.

Achim Baumann, political director of the aviation association A4E, puts it more diplomatically: “It is a small step towards real improvement. Things that we would have expected to facilitate coordination between states and different actors are not explicitly set out there.”

Johan Lundgren, CEO of Easyjet, says: “It’s a long time to wait. We expect to save between 10 and 15 percent of all CO2 emissions in the Easyjet network alone because we don’t really fly straight or at the right altitude. That just has to change.”

For airlines, the potential benefits are clear, but the reality is messy. Air traffic controllers stress that the airspace is critical national infrastructure and that, as with such projects, there are political issues, local objections and delays. For example, the UK Civil Aviation Authority announced last month another phase of its own airspace modernisation plan, now scheduled for 2040, although it began seven years ago. “Modernisation needs to be accelerated” across Europe and the UK, says Heathrow boss Thomas Woldbye.

The airspace, or the systems that manage it and enable aircraft to fly, are “like the railway system, only in the air,” says Woldbye. “But it is just as important to aviation as the rail infrastructure is to trains.”

But rather than a high-speed route through the sky, Europe’s airspace is more of a rickety network of interconnected branches – managed by several different systems. The new Aviation Secretary Mike Kane recently described Britain’s system as “an analogue airspace in the digital age, more reminiscent of the time when Yuri Gagarin reached for the stars”.

Technology has theoretically made it possible for any nation to remotely control flights over another’s airspace – an example of this is the virtual control towers at airports such as London City Airport. Few nations have this level of trust.

The SES has reduced the boundaries somewhat – a new block of frictionless airspace connecting the Benelux countries and northern Germany came into force last November, Eurocontrol said. SES has “definitely helped,” says Woldbye, “but still 10% or more of flights do not take the optimal route. We still have congestion in areas where we should not take them because there are not enough resources on the ground and the airspace is structured along national lines rather than EU lines.”

Aviation experts wonder whether the many airlines competing with each other really believe that a single service provider would be the best solution, even if it were technically feasible. But the bigger questions are legal and political.

“Airlines would like to see the French controlling British airspace – that’s not going to happen, let’s be realistic,” says Tanja Grobotek, director of European affairs at Canso, a global association representing air navigation service providers. “In an ideal world, airlines would like to see themselves as the only customers of the airspace. But there are other users.”

While modes of transport such as cargo planes, private jets, drones and, one day, flying taxis are vying for the opportunity, the most important customer is the military. And the invasion of Ukraine has doubled sensitivities while exacerbating air traffic problems in Europe.

Flights around the continent and to Asia are avoiding Ukraine and Russia, adding to congestion. NATO exercises in response to the heightened threat from Moscow have also led to some of the largest airspace closures since the Icelandic volcano eruption led to flight bans in 2010.

The politics of further integration are complicated, even without war. Air traffic controllers and the service providers who employ them are paid very differently across Europe, and the sector generates billions in fees every year – the Nats alone collected £807 million from flights in UK airspace last year. Some speculate whether AI could one day eliminate jobs, but for now air traffic controllers – particularly French ones – have considerable industrial power.

This year, strikes in France were kept to a minimum by an agreement in the run-up to the Olympics. Instead, weather-related delays in air travel increased, as did waiting times due to congestion and limited capacity in European airspace, rising by almost 50 percent compared to the previous year.

“We have airspace. It’s just distributed inefficiently,” says an angry Lundgren, adding that the need for reform is “more obvious than ever.”

Whether or not the promised Single European Sky ever materializes, improved technologies could bring many benefits, argue the air traffic control companies – even if they estimate the potential CO2 savings at 6-7% instead of 10-15%. Grobotek says: “The experience of flying seamlessly across Europe as an airline can be achieved without having a single provider or without states having to give up their sovereignty.”

However, she says: “If you fly the shortest route as an individual airline, that may be fine for you, but capacity is not unlimited. You have to see what is best for the whole system.”