Cluttered Air Control Systems Hamper European Plane Traffic

Alitalia flight 3901 from Venice to Rome left 40 minutes late one sunny September day, and the pilot’s excuse was one passengers heard a lot this summer on intra-European routes.

“There’s just a lot of congestion in the sky,” he said.

In fact, Alitalia was hobbled this summer by an Italian air traffic controllers’ strike. But this particular flight was not among those affected, and even disregarding strikes, clogged skies sharply increased flight delays this year.

This rekindled an old debate between European airlines and governments about why, every couple of years, there is a surge in delays.

From April to June, according to the 25-member Association of European Airlines, 17 percent of aircraft takeoffs were late (defined as more than 15 minutes after scheduled time), compared with 12 percent in the same period last year. In June, almost 20 percent of flights left late, the worst figure in three years.

The association’s secretary general, Karl-Heinz Neumeister, ascribed the delays to the slow pace of improvements in Europe’s splintered system of air traffic control. While some delays were caused by weather or crowded airports, he said, almost two-thirds were caused by poor air traffic control.

According to a 1992 study by the association, Western Europe had 54 air traffic control centers, compared with 20 in the United States. The European centers used 31 different computerized systems made by 18 manufacturers. The airlines estimate that the excess time planes spend circling in the air or parked on runways increases the cost of their operations by about $5 billion a year. Since those costs are passed on to the customer, travelers pay an average 8 percent more per ticket, the airlines say.

The airlines are quick to point out that the situation poses no risk to travelers’ safety. But that is simply because air traffic controllers limit the number of planes in the air to allow for the network’s shortcomings.

At the heart of the airlines’ complaint is the argument that national governments in Europe are obsessed with local sovereignty, refusing to surrender control of the skies over national territories to any supranational authority.

Their association supports a plan put forward in the early 1990s by the European Civil Aviation Conference, which includes transport ministers from 33 countries, to reduce the number of control centers and to introduce the latest satellite systems.

But with so many fingers in the pie, the pace of change is painfully slow.