France is responsible for a third of airborne delays in Europe

France, world champion of the air traffic controllers' strike. Indeed, and although two billion euros have been spent to modernize control infrastructures since 2011, 254 days of strikes by controllers were recorded in France between 2004 and 2016 – a figure that is out of proportion with our neighbors, Greece 2nd place on the podium with 46 days. The dilapidated system, causing delays and technical errors, also causes 300 million losses each year to companies. As a result, France is responsible for a third of all airborne delays in Europe.

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Moreover, air traffic across the old continent is not far from saturation, reveals the Swiss newspaper Neue Zücher Zeitung . If France has a heavy responsibility in this state of affairs, the whole of Europe must question itself.

A European problem

The shortcomings noted in France are, to a lesser extent, similar to those of the entire continent, reports Neue Zürcher Zeitung . While air traffic has grown by 30% in five years, the newspaper points out that "only the development of delays follows this growth". In fact, one-fifth of all European flights are delayed by more than 20 minutes. What exasperate pbadengers and airlines, which every minute of delay costs an average of one hundred euros. An average delay that should almost double, according to Eamonn Brennan, director of Eurocontrol, and reach for the same proportion of aircraft 30 to 35 minutes this summer, at the peak of traffic.

Several factors are involved: the number one Eurocontrol, the authority in charge of coordinating the various controllers at European level, testifies to the difficulty of its organization in centralizing a task to which countries are very attached, the control of the airspace above their territory. 41 such services take over the surveillance of air routes as and when the aircraft is flying, with the complexity involved in such a relay race; in addition, this practice creates bottlenecks, with the weakest control points creating and pbading on their errors across the chain. Another reason is the dearth of air traffic controllers that European control towers suffer. Regula Dettling-Ott, Swiss expert on civil aviation, tells the Zurich newspaper that "more than 60% of delays in European airspace are due to a shortage of air navigation personnel", compared to only 25% due to weather conditions and 10% to strikes. Hence the need for airports to invest in human resources and control infrastructure. Among the seven control centers mainly implicated in these delays, three are French … The expert also deplores the lack of coordination between the centers, which do not develop control tools to better centralize the data. European airlines are the first victims of these inconsistencies, which cost them 1.6 billion a year in increased operating costs and compensation for pbadengers.

If the measure "Free Route Airspace" promoted by Eurocontrol could bring some relief to companies, by predefining routes for airlines without the need for permanent monitoring of control centers, there is still some way to go before the airports are "the sad reality that nearly 50,000 pbadengers have to wait up to two hours late at European airports", according to Violeta Bulc, European Commissioner for Transport