Single Sky again
 

The recent CCF around the Iceland eruptions have lead the Dutch Minister, Eurlings, to announce moves to unify the European airspace under one provider,Eurocontrol. The 26 Ministers of Transport, or deputies, are presently in Brussel to discuss the ash crisis, the damage caused and future policies.

It's what Eurocontrol was created to do, but the political will, notably from France & UK, has never been there before.

Not so. The Single Sky doesn't envisage a single provider - and certainly not Eurocontrol. The 'network manager' that everyone is talking about will be an enhanced CFMU, essentially Eurocontrol will be an expert body providing guidance and coordination to member states, who retain sovereignty over their airspaces but function within the 9 'Functional Airspace Blocks'. The political clout, imposing and enforcing performance targets, will come from the EU.

That's the theory, anyway.

Anything that 'comes from the EU', put together with words like 'enforce', 'coordinate', 'collate', 'unionize' makes me damn scared. Despite of the fact that european airspace is too fragmented indeed, it's just the wrong way to fix it. The only way is to leave this to the good old friend named evolution - as it happens now, by itself. There are countries that have delegated portions of their airspace to each other just to reduce coordination and make things easier. That's how it goes, step by step. Any enforced action to make this work from some specific day onwards will fail.

But sadly - they'll do it, anyway. And they will hire a few thousand people to coordinate it, so the result will be so called 'negative cost reduction', or 'increase', as some politically incorrect fools call it ;-) Any aspect will be discussed by a dozen of task groups, located of course all over the western Europe (as you know, commuting between Brussels and Strasbourg is fun, especially if somebody else pays!) and at the very end nobody will remeber what was the initial objective.

Wise words Samotnik, wise words.