Working in air traffic management on occasion one gets the impression that a lot of people have very short memories. Take for instance the proud announcement from FABEC (Functional Airspace Block Europe Central) to the effect that as part of the harmonization of European airspace, shorter night routes are being offered on 115 cross-border connections. FABEC as you may know is one of the elements in the new style European airspace fragmentation called FAB. Belgium, France, Germany, Luxemburg, the Netherlands and Switzerland are working together to bring improvements in their “joint” airspace.
The announcement includes the usual claims about the airlines being able to save 800 thousand nautical miles per year translating to 4800 tonnes of fuel saved and 16000 tonnes less CO2 emissions. Nice… but what is wrong with this picture?
First of all, night directs had been in use all over Europe also in the past and while it was not always possible to flight plan on the shorter routes (and hence the fuel carried had to be for the longer version), the difference in savings when the route is plannable is low. The 800 thousand nautical miles saved is compared to the day-time route lengths and not to the actual miles flown during the night as a result of ad-hoc directs normally given by controllers on a routine basis.
So the FABEC announcement is comparing apples to pears and as such it does not show the actual, real savings which are far less than the claims. What they did was to formalize things that were there already, well mostly. As usual, the claims for the benefits is overblown as it had been for things like Mode S enhanced surveillance and some other favorites of the ground centered system fans.
In the CANSO announcement of this FABEC “achievement” lower traffic at night and lower military activity are given as the factors that make the shorter routes possible. This is true but in this light the shorter routes are not achievements but simply actions to remedy a situation that should not have existed in the first place. So, airlines were in fact flying 800 thousand miles more than necessary in the past simply because ANSPs were not able to formalize the shorter routes in the past? Did they need a FAB to realize this? I do not remember hearing them saying in the past that routes being flown at night were unnecessarily long and wasteful…
Of course every little step towards improved ATM is good news but the steps need to be put in context and only real achievements be hailed as such.
Also, comparing apples to apples would help in making benefit claims more credible in the future…
P.S. By the way… as you may have noticed, European ATM experts could not even agree where Central Europe is located. You have a FAB EC and a FAB CE (see map below) whicn stand for FAB Europe Central and FAB Central Europe, respectively. What is in a name, you will say… but still.
Some of these borders still look suspiciously like national borders to me!
Thanks very much for this post, Steve. When I first read about this exceptional achievement at work I straight away went ballistic. This is exactly the way we have been working for the last 30+ years, there is nothing new here.
To sell it on this level to the public is unacceptable but to advertise it to the industry is just silly. Politics and media, the deadliest combination of our time.
It is indeed most unfortunate that some people tend to forget that there are at least two groups of people who will not be charmed by vaporware like this. First and foremost controllers and pilots know first hand what is happening and recognize things for what they are. Then there are those who have been working for years (already way before SESAR by the way) to define and implement ATM improvements who will obviously speak up when they see this kind of distortion. There is of course the very real danger that bean counters will only see the numbers and be happy… Why push for the much more complicated, real improvements if it is this easy??? Let’s hope that this particular vaporware news was a one off, the product of an over enthusiastic communications effort.
It woud be nice to see a reaction from the originators of the news… I am really curious how they would defend the numbers in view of the actual daily practice of the past 30 years or so.
Happy new year!