The FAB Saga. 2012 Edition.

2012 is a significant year for the European Functional Airspace Blocks (FAB). Namely, they must all be fully operational by December this year. All nine of them. Let’s have a quick look at these things to get a good overview of their status and impact.
First and foremost I think one needs to clarify that if the words ”fully operational” as applied to the FABs in this context were to be used to describe an aircraft, we would see engineering drawings pasted onto old and creaky desks and little more.
Each FAB is in fact an entity composed of two or more ANSPs who have banded together mainly on political grounds. The ANSPs in each FAB have had a horribly difficult time forging agreements amongst themselves and most of the time work focused on political and financial issues with little attention to really substantial operational improvements. Work on how the FABs themselves will cooperate with each other across Europe has hardly started. Now these new fortresses of ANSP might must submit their plans to the European Commission by 24 June so that airspace users and other stakeholders may comment on them. With most of Europe going on holidays in July and August, stakeholder comments are unlikely to be available before the end of September (and then I am being extremely charitable). So, the FABs will have all of two months to implement those plans or if they do it earlier, it will be tantamount to ignoring stakeholder comments. Where have we seen that before?
This whole FAB craze is of course a questionable thing that is likely to turn out to be the most expensive flop yet… until SESAR flops but that is still some way down the road.

Just look at the way FABs have been set up. They were supposed to reduce fragmentation and make things smoother overall. The traffic between London and Paris will cross from the UK-Ireland FAB into Fabec… so none of the improvements inside those FABs will count for much while the interface is basically the same as before. Why the FAB?

Or look at the Scandinavian traffic going into Spain. They will pass through at least three but if they are unlucky, four FABs. Again, improvements inside the FABs will be of little help overall for the traffic stream as such.
If somebody now says that this is why EUROCOPNTROL is there as the network manager, my answer is: please, let’s not kid each other. EUROCONTROL has not been given extra powers to deal with shortcomings in the “network”… at best they can recommend things that will be carried out… or not.
I am not alone with my doubts about what the FABs will bring in terms of real benefits. IATA sees the problem in the same light: what ANSPs have achieved is clearing the obstacles from being able to declare themselves as part of a given FAB, but that is about all. The FAB agreements contain mighty little in terms of infrastructure rationalization or even better procedures and what little there is, could (and should) have been done without the FABs anyway.
Add to this the sad fact that, all claims to the contrary, the FAB concept is not only not at the basis of SESAR but it is in fact a complication nobody needs. SESAR was always meant to be a trajectory based approach to air traffic management while the FABs are airspace based. Had they been introduced when originally proposed almost a decade ago they might have made sense and would have been gotten rid of when SESAR took off. Mixing them into SESAR now does nothing but create the worst of both worlds.
It is interesting to recall that the ANSPs were anything but thrilled by the idea when the European Commission first proposed the establishment of functional blocks of airspace as a way to improve the hopeless ATM situation in Europe. Together with the Single European Sky legislation the whole outlandish FAB idea was seen as a threat to ANSP independence and they successfully kept it from happening until the EC got tough with them in the context of SES2. But when they realized that banding together in a FAB would give the most ambitious ANSPs their own backyard to play in while also making EUROCONTROL all but irrelevant, the ANSPs quickly changed tack. FABs grew out of the ground like mushrooms and in no time at all nine of the damn things were approved… They all mimic the old, politically divided European airspace structure and in fact represent a new kind of fragmentation. Since flow management inside the FABs will be a local activity, conceptually the whole thing is a throwback to the 70s, to the times before centralized flow management was established.
To summarize the FAB situation in the spring of 2012: establishment is progressing slower than expected while the uncertainty about the benefits continues to grow; the concept is incompatible with SESAR but this is not being admitted, instead SESAR is being warped to fit the FABs; the upcoming deadline of December 2012 for fully operational FABs is unlikely to be met except if fully operational means ready to figure out why Europe is doing this…
Of course there are plenty of reassuring words from FAB managers saying that things will be achieved even if it happens slowly. What they conveniently forget or prefer not to talk about is the fact that there is absolutely no paradigm change in the FAB concept. All it does is force the ANSPs to do part of what they had already promised to do in EATCHIP and ATM2000+ (remember those projects?) so what the heck is still keeping them from doing it?
The key word here is “part”… The plans being developed in the FAB context fall far short of the lofty aims of EATCHIP and ATM2000+ but apparently even this reduced set is too ambitious for some.
True, we all trust SESAR to delivery the real stuff…
I am just wondering how the ATM story will  look like in 2020? After EATCHIP, ATM2000+, the FABs and SESAR, the ATM2020++ project is progressing slightly slower than planned…
I hope I am wrong…