Visiting EUROCONTROL these days is a bit like entering a five star hotel during off-season in a bad year. Empty offices at every turn and talk in the corridors that tends to focus more on individual futures than on trajectory based operations and other exotic ideas.
Yes, EUROCONTROL is reorganizing (again…) but they are also cutting loose most contract personnel, and even the permanent staff is being reduced. One might say this is a sign of the times – cost cutting being the name of the game everywhere. Like in all organizations, there was a lot of deadwood at EUROCONTROL, but it was and is a unique European institution concentrating ATM skills like no other place on the continent. When an icon like that decides to change itself in fundamental ways, there must be something serious in the air.
Of course EUROCONTROL has to adapt to the new environment as dictated by the Single European Sky and SESAR. One can only hope that this adaptation will result in something better and more efficient. But I have my doubts.
I remember some years ago people used to joke that if EUROCONTROL does not get its act together, the superb headquarters building in Haren will be turned into a great conference hotel which hotel room starved Brussels would no doubt have welcomed with open arms. But jokes apart, most of the real or perceived “failures” of EUROCONTROL back then were not due to incompetence on the part of their experts. Far from it! These experts came with truly forward looking ideas and proposals and some of those are now part of the more advanced features of SESAR to-day! So why were those ideas not implemented back then, years and decades ago? Mainly because European States blocked most of them cold. Why? Because those advanced ideas would have required the kind of continent wide cooperation SES and SESAR are now proposing and that was anathema to most ANSPs keen on protecting their own turf. That things have not changed much until quite recently is shown clearly in the extreme difficulties the European Commission has had in pushing the Single European Sky towards acceptance.
Another item to worry about is the concept of Functional Airsapce Blocks (FAB). Although shown as the highest political priority of the Commission, FABs as they are being constructed actually represent a throwback to earlier unhappy times, when groups of States tried to manage their traffic, paying scant attention to the effects of their actions further afield. FABs are not that bad of course, but they are planning to manage traffic on the FAB level, relegating CFMU and the continent wide traffic management idea to a secondary role, cleverly called “network management”. In the FAB context, this term means more or less: leave us alone!
Worse, the whole FAB idea is incompatible with the SESAR concept of operations. The SESAR CONOPS was never meant to deal with a collection of FABs,
each of which represents a fiefdom of its members. The SESAR CONOPS, like NextGen in the US, envisages an operation that seamlessly covers a whole continent which is managed top-down without additional layers like FABs shielding further fragmentation below. FABs could have been a great interim measure to drag the reluctant brides to the altar until SESAR came along. But as usual, the stakeholders argued and delayed too long time before doing anything, and now FABs and SESAR are on a collision course. If alarm bells are not ringing already, they should be.
And of course finally there is SESAR, the great hope of all who care about the future of air traffic management in Europe. There is no reason to doubt that the work in SESAR will result in real improvements and that the changes coming do need organizations like EUROCONTROL to adapt.
So, why worry? Imagine a past where Europe had had a real ATM body similar to the FAA with the proper licenses and powers and funds to engineer progress. This body could very well have been EUROCONTROL. Just as California or New Mexico cannot tell the FAA to go and stuff it, so would it have been impossible for certain European states to effectively block progress because they had different interests, priorities and zillion other reasons for saying nay to many of the same things SES and SESAR are pushing now.
If we had had this magical version of EUROCONTROL, we would not need SESAR to-day because most of the ideas would have been implemented years ago and the basis would already be there for the rest. But the states did not allow this to happen.
So why worry? Because we do have SESAR but still no visible magical version of whatever body could actually drive all concerned towards implementing a truly pan-European solution. No, the SESAR Joint Undertaking does not have such powers and we have seen how even the Commission can be cowed into submission when the all powerful ANSPs set their minds to it.
Europe has this tendency of ignoring timely warnings and then scrambling for solutions when the very thing they were warned about comes to pass. The common currency, the euro is a huge achievement but at its introduction experts warned loud and clear that monetary union without closer political integration was an unstable thing at best. The current crisis in Greece, and its potential to pull down euroland with it, is a great example of a warning ignored and the need to face the consequences now.
The situation of air traffic management is similar. Unless there is a clearly identifiable body with the right powers, responsibilities and knowledge to manage and push implementation, things are unlikely to follow a path that is different form the past. Parochial thinking and local interests are still very much alive and well…
One can only hope that a slimmed down, reorganized EUROCONTROL will fit into this new environment like a glove and possibly even take on the task it was originally invented for.
