If you’re thinking of jetting off on that long-awaited European holiday this summer, you may wish to wait until after the peak summer season. Officials in Europe are expressing increasing concern over the level of air-traffic density causing delays, which are predicted to be even worse than this time last year. And, 2018 was a record-setting summer in terms of air traffic congestion over the Continent.
According to Eurocontrol—an intergovernmental organization consisting of 41 member countries, which works to coordinate air traffic management among the continent’s various air navigation service providers—announced that delays for flights across Europe could exceed even last year’s levels.
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It seems that air traffic density over European travel hubs has reached critical capacity. Among the major contributing factors to passenger delays are en-route constraints or congestion among flight operations occurring within high-altitude airspace.
A joint FAA-Eurocontrol report issued in May found that, while air traffic increased by 3.8 percent last year over 2017, total en-route delays more than doubled in 2018. According to the report, the majority (60.4 percent) of reported delays could be attributed to staff shortages and decreased air capacity, with the remainder being due to weather (25.3 percent) or labor disruptions (14.3 percent), such as airlines/air-france-klm-revenue-impacted-by-protests-in-france.html” rel=”nofollow”>France’s recent strike. And, nearly 80 percent of all en-route delays in 2018 were generated between May and September.
It’s important to remember that, while Europe and the U.S. are considered comparable in terms of the number of flights being operated and their overall geographic area coverage, they rely on fundamentally different air traffic management systems. While operations are unified across the whole of the U.S., flights over Europe are managed by disparate entities, representing each separate country’s airspace. This fragmentation causes complexity in communications and longer wait times for planes to receive approval as they pass overhead.
“Finding solutions for the capacity crunch is now urgent,” European commissioner for transport, Violeta Bulc, said while speaking at the IATA general meeting in Seoul earlier this month.
While measures are already being taken to address these broader, systematic issues within Europe’s air traffic control infrastructure, the situation has not been remedied just yet.
