Functional Airspace Blocks (FAB) – New category on Roger-Wilco

FABs may be the highest political priority for the European Commission and they certainly are the source of high flying political statements, but I still do not like them. Why? Well, the idea when it first came up was a good one. At the time, functional fragmentation of air traffic management in Europe was costing airspace users billions and in spite of all the projects being considered, there was little hope for structural reform.
In order to break the logjam, and fully aware that there was no hope for getting the whole of Europe to co-operate and create a single sky, the EC very pragmatically proposed that groups of States get together and create functional airspace blocks (FAB) along the lines of their ATM “interests”, optimizing and aligning procedures and services inside their FAB… This way, the argument went, at least there would be a single sky of sorts inside the FAB and later on the FABs themselves could be harmonized for a truly single European sky.
Pragmatic and logical as the idea may have been, it was not received by the ANSPs with open arms.

Delay followed delay and it was only when the EC brought all her regulatory might to bear that things started to move. Of course, this being Europe, the number of FABs grew like mushrooms and we ended up with an arrangement that in many places is painfully similar to the old FIR boundaries… That the designers of the FABs could not even agree where Central Europe was is shown by the surprising fact that there is a FAB Central Europe and a FAB Europe Central… explain that to a visitor from China.

Other than that, a few truly worrying developments are also becoming apparent. Centralized European flow management is being inexorably replaced by a concept of managing flows on the FAB level by the FABs themselves and relegating EUROCONTROL to managing the network… these are other words for a toothless tiger. Real power to do things is concentrated inside the FABs. Some of us will still remember how flow control was being done in the 70s. Exactly like this…
Another issue concerns the fundamental incompatibility between the SESAR Concept of Operations and the FAB concept. SESAR is a trajectory based concept, the FAB is a legacy, airspace based, approach. Had the FABs been established when they were first proposed, they would have provided a good basis for transition to the infinitely more advanced SESAR TBO (trajectory based operations). With all the delays caused by initial obfuscation, there is now a head-on collision between the two concepts. From the SESAR TBO perspective, the FABs represent the kind of airspace fragmentation they were supposed to eliminate. Politically charged as they are, SESAR will have a hard time getting rid of this baby that is arriving too late on the scene.
You also get a taste of what is to come when you consider the news from FAB EC about shorter night routes… These were presented late last year as a major FAB achievemet when in fact all they did was formalize what controllers had been doing for the past 30 years already (read more about this here).
Having said this, of course even FABs will bring improvements and if handled properly, their transition (and disappearance…) under the TBO concept should be possible to achieve.
Recognizing that in spite of their shortcomings FABs will represent an exciting area of ATM developments for a long time to come, we have decided to write about them in the future with more regularity than we did in the past. Like always, your own views on and experience with the FAB concept and implementation will be very welcome.