The UK air traffic control system is “at breaking point”, the head of air traffic control service NATS has warned, with more aircraft in the airspace available across Europe than ever before.
NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe told the Airports UK conference in London last week: “We have 25% less airspace in Europe since Russia invaded Ukraine and considerably more aircraft [in the air at any time] down towards Greece.
“The capacity of the system is at breaking point. The only way to deal with that is by more collaboration and not finger pointing.”
NATS was the subject of a highly critical report, commissioned by the CAA and published last month, into its system failure on August Bank Holiday Monday last year. The report made 34 recommendations for improving the aviation industry’s response during air traffic disruption.
But Rolfe said some problems were beyond NATS’ control due to a lack of shared information, saying: “We have flights plotted and allocate airspace slots with no idea how many aircraft will be in UK airspace at any point on a route.”
As an example, he noted the morning arrival of multiple long-haul flights into UK airspace posed a daily problem leading to delays in departures for outbound flights from Heathrow, saying: “We have to land them, so we stop other flights getting airborne.”
Rolfe warned the planned modernisation of UK airspace, on which the CAA is consulting, “will make a big difference in the UK, but only in the UK because a lot of the issues [we face] are European.”
Heathrow chief operating officer Javier Echave agreed, saying: “There is no single magic bullet. A lot of things need to get better. We need to lobby in Europe to address delays.”
David Silk, aviation and airports director at the Department for Transport (DfT), noted “changes to the operating environment” due to the warming climate and extreme weather events were adding to the airspace disruption.
He confirmed the government is committed to giving the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) greater powers to enforce consumer protection, saying: “The aviation sector has clear commercial incentives to be as resilient as possible and the last thing the government wants to do is get in the way, but government has a role to ensure the best possible experience for passengers.
“We’re committed to go further in giving the CAA more consumer powers.”
CAA group director for consumers and markets Selina Chadham told the conference she intends “to look at compliance on passenger rights and pull the sector up where there are areas of weakness”.
She said: “People feel their flights are being disrupted more [and] I’m not sure airlines and airports are in the right place in communicating with passengers when things go wrong. We’ll undertake research on what passengers expect in the New Year and look to work with the industry on it.”