Aero Politics
Aero Politics
By asking this FAB question you have perhaps inadvertently wandered into the realm of Aero Politics!
To understand the rationale for FABs, its best to start at the beginning, with apologies for stating the obvious to those that know all this.
- Air Traffic Control exists in a political world. This starts at ICAO which sets for states the Standards and Recommended Practices (SARPS) by which aviation operates on a global basis. ICAO comprises about 190 member states – governments, who usually have as their ICAO representation a member from the Department of Transport. This is the DfT in the UK. Each government is by ICAO convention obliged to provide a legal framework for the provision of Air Traffic Control in its airspace, which in turn is normally established by the aviation regulator in the specific country. This is the CAA in the UK. In the European environment there are 39 such national regulators. These set rules as to which organization can provide service where and on what basis for each country.
- Notice that NATS does not have a place at ICAO. This is also the case for DFS, ENAV and others. This is normal where the service provider is separate from the regulator – which according to ICAO it should be. The ATC providers are well down the political ladder. Mere service providers!
- In most countries responsibility for provision of en route service is delegated by government on a monopoly basis to a national ATC provider – NATS in the UK, and in most cases these providers are required to recover all their operating costs from their customers, no matter how much they spend. This has often led to a cost plus culture and from the user perspective is seen as inefficient, especially in Europe. But this is also true elsewhere. Here in Europe service costs are roughly twice the equivalent level in North America.
- Now step forward the European Union, political masters who set political objectives for ATC in Europe way back in about 2004. The EU, which is also an organization of Governments, said that ATC in Europe should by 2020 be able to: Provide three times the ATM capacity, at half the unit cost, while improving environmental performance by 10% and improving safety performance by a factor of ten.
- The EU recognized that this was a tough call and set about providing the frameworks and tools to allow this to happen. This included setting up SESAR for the ATM technical research and concept development (2.1bn Euro over 8 years). EASA was also established to be the one European regulator – not to replace the 39, but at least the 27 or so in the EU.
- Eurocontrol, also an organization of states – not ATC providers – and which has also had a regulatory role, is also being reformed into a network manager, a kind of Flow Management unit on steroids, which also (for now) manages the charging recovery. Eurocontrol will lose control of Maastricht Center, which is expected to be subsumed into the FABEC, which in turn comprises Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, France and Switzerland. This means that Eurocontrol as of next year is unlikely to be an ATC provider in the operating sense.
- The EU has also set up a performance scheme for ATC services, which comes into effect at the end of this year and which requires that ATC providers progressively reduce their unit costs, while delivering capacity and safety and so on per the political objectives. This performance scheme disconnects costs and charges. This is very important.
- What does this mean? In a cost recovery system, if it costs 100 units to provide an ATC service and there are 100 flights, each flight pays one unit. If traffic goes down as per 2008/9 to say 90 flights, but cost of service provision stays at 100, then each flight pays 1.11 units. An 11% increase. Result angry customers! This is what happened during the recession. The performance scheme very simplistically means that ATC providers will have to be able to reduce cost even faster if traffic declines. This is EU Law.
- As you might expect ATC providers were not happy, so the EU defined another “tool” to help to deliver cost efficiency… the Functional Airspace Block - FAB. There are 9 FABs in Europe including FABEC, the biggest. Unfortunately these are politically designed and do not generally reflect operational considerations. They are likely to fail for this and other reasons – hence the emperor having no clothes view so often heard.
- Now what does all this mean for the operating ATCO? Probably not much in the near term. Those at Maastricht will find themselves with a new employer before long. The most likely impact elsewhere is a greater political interest and a greater public visibility in their cost (pay and benefits). Many ATC providers will be unable to deliver the charging reductions that are required and are expected to get “help” from politicians, which will inevitably include customer transparency. Expect a more liberal labour market with much better possibility to move around Europe, and a more balanced set of salaries and benefits, rather than the vast variations that exist across Europe today. Also expect much more outsourcing of things like training.
Hope that helps!!
Katie