Supermarkets and air traffic control – what is the connection?
On 10/03/2010, in Viewpoint, by cleo
It is tough times in Belgium these days. After the shocking news that Opel will close its car plant in Antwerp leaving thousands without work, it is now the Carrefour supermarket chain that announced the closure of 21 of its locations in the country. For our non-European readers, Carrefour is a French chain similar to K-Mart in the US but with a more comprehensive assortment of food.
Carrefour (ranked world number two in 2008) arrived in Belgium at the time it became known that Wal-Mart was opening its assault on the European retail market several years ago. European retailers, even the big ones, were worried that Wal-Mart would snap them up to create its foothold in Europe. So they went on to consolidate inside France snapping up smaller competitors there and they also spread out into neighboring lands, like Belgium where Carrefour bought the local chain GB.
About a year ago, one of the Carrefour supermarkets created a lot of buzz when it hired a crew at a rate below the one used at other Carrefour locations. Those who got work were happy but the unions went on strike and shut down the other locations, demanding that the salaries of the lower paid workers be raised. Several of the latter were on TV saying that they were happy as they were and did not want this interference.
What does this have to do with air traffic management?
A kid in the tower, a pilot without license and other things
On 08/03/2010, in Viewpoint, by steve
The unprecedented success of the air transport industry is due mainly to the spectacular improvements in safety booked overt the years. True, the convenience of being able to travel to the other end of Europe for a meeting and back the same day count for a lot, but without the safety factor, few passengers would accept the hassle of endless security queues and legroom appropriate for the shortest 10 % of the population only.
The exemplary safety record is the result of constant vigilance, safety management systems and the responsible attitudes of those working with or around aircraft.
Any disturbance that could negatively affect safety or even the perception of safety would be a disaster to the industry on a scale that would dwarf the effects of the recent financial meltdown in the world.
In a well running system complacency is one of the biggest dangers while it is also one of the most basic treats of the human character. Fighting complacency must be one of the most important items in any safety manager’s kit.
Recently however we seem to be seeing signs of a disturbing trend.
CANAC2 operational – is there a future for CANAC2?
On 12/02/2010, in Viewpoint, by pbn
February 10 was a day many in Belgium will remember for a long time. Most of the populace for the longest ever traffic jams, 950 kilometers in total, caused by early morning snow bringing chaos to the motorways. For a select few, February 10 will mark CANAC2’s going into live operations. CANAC is Belgium’s cutting edge air traffic control system and its most recent incarnation, representing a 60 million euro investment, puts a host of new, even more advanced functions at Belgian controllers’ fingertips. Surely a cause to celebrate…
But this is not what a number of protesters thought, picketing Belgocontrol’s entrance with slogans that read: “No SABENA bis, no time to celebrate”. What is going on?
Blogs, aviation and the rest of the social media
On 27/01/2010, in Viewpoint, by steve
When we started Roger-Wilco, a lot of people questioned the format. For some, a blog was not the right format for dealing with the serious questions of air traffic management. I could see the point in as much as a lot of blogs are indeed little more than a place for certain individuals to air their grievances about all kinds of subjects, many of which are of little interest to the world at large. But who can deny that they too have the right to publicize what is on their minds?
We simply had to make a better blog…
It would be easy to claim that I was always open to things like Twitter or FaceBook, but I was not. Especially Twitter
appeared to me the epitome of uselessness right alongside the male breast. FaceBook was something I could almost like but when they introduced the new “features” enabling users, among other things, to become “computer experts” by answering four or five ridiculously simple questions, I felt like running away. Seeing some of my most respected colleagues becoming such experts left me puzzled but no less determined to avoid FaecBook whenever possible.
LinkedIn was a different proposition right from the start. There one’s professional qualifications, work experience and other “real” things rule and people have actually found work when they were discovered by recruiters of major companies. LinkedIn actually reversed the switch in my mind…
But back to our blog…
What is wrong with Performance Based Navigation (PBN)?
On 14/12/2009, in Viewpoint, by steve
Exactly one third, that is what! The P is ok, the B is ok but the N? That is what is wrong and in a big way too! Let me explain.
Recently we had a very successful workshop on PBN and the agenda included a presentation on modern surveillance techniques and another one on cost-benefit analyses tailored to performance based systems. It was soon clear that several experts (mostly outside the workshop) thought that the surveillance presentation was out of place in a meeting on PBN. After all, PBN is dealing with navigation and not surveillance.
There you go, the good old silo mentality again! Thou shall not mix things from different silos!
Do a local reality check. How is your organization set up? Do you have separate departments for navigation, surveillance and communications? Ask someone from surv or com what PBN stands for… Are you getting the picture?
My FAB my Castle – is there hope for the European air traffic management enterprise?
On 27/11/2009, in Viewpoint, by pbn
I guess from a purely political point of view, criticizing the Functional Airspace Block (FAB) concept is probably not correct. I will not criticize the FABs. What I will do is share a few thoughts with you and also raise a few questions. Who knows, someone may even have the answers.
So what is a FAB? Contrary to what you may have heard, the FAB concept was/is an effort by the European Union to bring some order into the fragmented European ATM scene. That this was not exactly to everyone’s taste was amply evidenced in the time it took to get the first FAB (and subsequent FABs) off the ground. The process stalled a few times and lots of screaming brides had to be dragged to the altar before it was restarted again.
U.K. airspace “developments”?
On 26/11/2009, in Viewpoint, by cleo
A short article in Aviation Week and Space Technology caught my eye the other day. “Restructuring U.K. Skies” was the title and it announced that the U.K.’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) was beginning the process of defining airspace out to 2030, with industry-wide dialogue to begin in 2010. I counted the number of times the word “airspace” appeared in the item: six. I also counted the number of times the words trajectory based operations appeared. ZERO.
I think it is fair to assume that the editors of Aviation Week would have used the term “trajectory based operation” if they had seen it in the CAA’s press release or the “Airspace for Tomorrow” guidance document. So, its complete lack can be safely taken for an indication of its absence in the CAA’s material.
The United Kingdom is part of SESAR and experts from NATS have been involved in the writing of the SESAR Concept of Operations. So what gives?
NCS – What? Not CNS?!
On 22/11/2009, in Viewpoint, by steve
Whoever came up with the abbreviation CNS (a.k.a. Communications/Navigation/Surveillance) probably had no idea how much damage their invention would cause in air traffic management by perpetuating the kind of silo mentality that keeps many organizations hopelessly divided and experts retreating into their respective ivory towers.
If at least the inventors had the good sense of putting their beloved letters into some kind of logical order, like history, which would have given us NCS… We did navigate first (as in trying to find our way by reading the names of train stations and flying along highways), then communicated at first with lights and hand signals and later via radio and more recently we do surveillance. Not that NCS would have been any better at driving the silo mentality from the face of the earth.
Of course in the old days there was some logic in looking at navigating and communicating as something totally different from each other. You trained for one or the other, aircraft carried separate navigators and radio operators and when radar came along, the wizards of that kit were a completely new breed yet again. It was only logical also that separate fiefdoms should grow up along the letters NCS with hardly any horizontal contact between them. That they should fiercely protect their respective domains was perfectly natural…
GDP and the Key Performance Indicators of air traffic management
On 18/11/2009, in Viewpoint, by pbn
Time magazine in their 2 November issue published a very interesting essay. The author, Steven Faris, argues that using GDP (Gross Domestic Product) to judge how well a country was doing is wrong and misleading. The idea behind GDP was only to show how much money is changing hands, nothing more, nothing less. Should we not use a metric that actually measures the things we really care about, he asks.
To illustrate the inadequacy of GDP to measure what we always thought it did, he gives a few telling examples. Natural disasters, oil spills, car crashes, riots, crime: anything you pay to fix will boost GDP. Helping a neighbor up the stairs, skipping work to see your son’s basketball game or walking in the woods will not.
Reading the essay it occurred to me that in air traffic management we have our own ingrained GDP equivalent, the famous KPIs or Key Performance Indicators. True, GDP was devised by economist Simon Kuznets at the end of the Great Depression (not the current one but the one before it…) and the KPIs for things like the SESAR project were put together within the last five years. They should be ok… Well, I am not so sure.
Passengers are not the only ones who need good communications – pilots do too!
On 14/11/2009, in Viewpoint, by steve
Few parts of aircraft have evolved as little as the communications capability. OK, we no longer use tubes in the radios but other than that, the VHF AM system is as legacy as they come. To add insult to injury, when the shortage of frequencies in the aviation band finally forced the industry to do something, instead of going for a modern and future proof solution, the channel spacing was split from 25 to 8.33 kHz. While partially solving the frequency problem, this solution did little more then perpetuating the shortcomings of the legacy voice system for decades to come. Who wants to think about yet another upgrade when the industry has just recently invested in 8.33? This sad picture in the voice communications arena is matched by an even bigger problem in air/ground data communications.
While the world has moved to high-speed comms en-masse, aviation is still stuck with ACARS (slow) SATCOM (slow and expensive) and VDL Mode 2 which offers the most, at least in continental airspace.
In the meantime, more and more airlines and aircraft types are offering truly cutting edge technology to enable passengers to send
email, browse the internet, watch television and (brrrr!) even use their cell phones in flight. Earlier attempts, like Connexion by Boeing were not a huge success but this has not discouraged airlines like Lufthansa from signing up with new contenders. True, these now offer much more efficient and reliable service, so the added value is there. In fact, there are several new offerings on the market, all competing to get on board somebody’s aircraft. Clearly, passengers’ thirst for maintaining their connectivity while airborne is an irresistible force for airlines and providers alike.
Air accident investigation – is Europe moving?
On 14/11/2009, in Viewpoint, by cleo
If you purchase a WiFi router or other WiFi piece of gear, you expect it to work anywhere in the world. After all, that is what standards are all about. Except for some channels not being available in the US for example, your expectation is correct. If you inspect the specs on the box however, you will find an interesting note, at least if you buy your gear in Europe. The authorized output power is different in France from that in other countries of the Union! Why is this relevant?
Well, in daily practice you will not notice much of this discrepancy but in our little EU there are other examples of this parochial approach to handling things, to the greater glory of our politicians and their efforts to gain popularity even at the expense of public good. European Union public good to be sure.
When we step on board an aircraft, we expect to step out in one piece and becoming a statistic is far from our minds. This is the correct attitude, after all flying is still the safest method of transport and the odds of not getting hurt are all on our side.
Competence counts
On 07/11/2009, in Viewpoint, by phil
Listening to the interview with Capt. Sully Sullenburger who successfully ditched his Airbus A320 in the Hudson River after multiple bird-strikes knocked out its engines, I was impressed by his calm, considered and authoritative manner. He is a first class ambassador for airmen throughout the industry. I think I might buy his book.
While recognising that he and his crew did an excellent job ditching in the Hudson, I would still like to think that most
competent crews would have performed equally well. The problem is that we normally never hear of the first class jobs done day in day out by many crews that avoid an accident. They achieve this either through good judgement which avoids anything happening at all. Or by well applied skill so that only those within the profession ever hear about the event. It is only the incidents which become obvious to the media or which turn into accidents that are noticed by the general public.
But what I find really disturbing is what seems to be the general erosion of the standing of the professional airman as described by Sully. We will be in danger of not getting enough good recruits, and if the accountants press too far, not training them well enough. What that will do for aviation safety must be of great concern to us all.
Air traffic service provision – business logic in reverse?
On 01/11/2009, in Viewpoint, by steve
The letter S in the abbreviation ATS stands for Services. Air traffic services are the essential commodity all but the simplest VFR flyers are obliged to purchase, at least for the foreseeable future. Air traffic control is one of these services. The price varies as does the value for money across the planet.
What happens if demand for a given service goes down? The price drops right? WRONG! In European air traffic service provision air navigation service providers are obliged to recover 100 % of their costs from the airspace users. When demand for the service diminishes, the price goes up. This is logical since the cost of the service is only loosely connected with the number of aircraft handled while reduced demand means there are fewer aircraft who will share the same overall cost.
So, those users who manage to survive the first onslaught of a crisis will be rewarded by the system with higher user charges… Taking this to an extreme, and admittedly hypothetical, scenario the last airline standing would not only need to switch off the lights but also take out a loan to pay for the passage of its last aircraft as it heads to the scrap yard.
Delta 767 lands on taxiway in Atlanta
On 28/10/2009, in Viewpoint, by cleo
OK, so those Northwest pilots were having a heated argument about company policies (at least that was reported) and they overshot their destination Minneapolis by a cool 150 miles… But what was the crew of the Delta Airlines 767 coming from Rio doing in the early morning of 19 October when they landed on taxiway M at Atlanta Hartsfield? Were they also discussing company policies? Ah this marriage between Northwest and Delta!
Taxiway M is parallel with Runway 27R and the weather conditions were good. 10 miles visibility in night conditions, no wind… The taxiway lights were on as were the runway lights. Apparently the approach lights were not switched on, who knows why? No vehicles or other aircraft were on the taxiway, so nobody was hurt. This time…
Atlanta is Delta’s home and one can assume that it was not the first time the flight crew landed on 27R there. Are statistics catching up with us (the very unlikely will also happen some time…) or are we seeing the results of a systemic problem many like to pretend does not exist?
Missing its destination – not the first time
On 27/10/2009, in Viewpoint, by cleo
You have all seen the news; Northwest Airbus misses Minneapolis with crew preoccupied with whatever they were doing… But this is not such a big deal. Listen to the following story.
In September 1995 I was out walking the dog (we had a wonderful Siberian Husky called Cyrano) when I noticed a DC-10-30 in Northwest livery taking off from Brussels. We live near the airport and our walks with Cyrano always had a dual purpose. Sniffing for the dog, plane spotting for me…
Northwest did not have flights in and out of Brussels and seeing the plane climbing steeply I said to myself, good, finally they are coming here also and I will not have to connect via Amsterdam when flying to the US (I was a WorldPerks member so flying NWA or KLM was important).
Well, they did fly into Brussels but only that once and unintentionally at that.
What is common between SUVs and business jets?
On 27/10/2009, in Viewpoint, by steve
Nothing you will say. But wait a second. These are not normal times…
Some of the people with the environment close to their hearts take to the streets every now and then and stab the tires of big, ugly and expensive SUVs. They are sending a message to the owners of the offending vehicles to improve their ways. Exchange them for bicycles… Never mind that some of those SUVs generate less green-house stuff than a host of smaller cars, they are a great object to turn their hate towards. Stabbing the tires does more damage to the environment than leaving them alone, but that is beside the point.
In aviation, business jets have suddenly become the SUV. Latent hate must have been there for a long time… anyone crammed into seat 59A who has seen a G650 taxi by must have felt the bile rise in his or her stomach. Those big, ugly, expensive business jets and the rich people riding in them… nothing short of a scandal.
Of course, it was the auto guys who finally ruined everything when they flew to Washington in their business jets to pick up a few billions in taxpayer money doled out by the US government. Who would think of driving their SUV to the social security office to pick up their unemployment check?
Put your 0.5 % where your mouth is
On 23/10/2009, in Viewpoint, by steve
The next big event on the environmental Agenda is the UN’s climate change Summit in Copenhagen in December. Since tackling aviation is high on the Summit’s priorities, the aviation world has been working frantically to get ICAO to agree on a set of high level emission goals to be put forward at the conference. For a time it looked like all efforts to the contrary, ICAO might go to the meeting with precious little to say. This would have been a total disaster because in the ensuing vacuum interests not exactly big fans of aviation would have tried to dictate the terms with regional differences and other spice added for good measure.
This danger is now past, the ICAO agreement is not only there, but it is more or less what the airspace user community and other partners in the industry wanted. IATA was key in shaping the industry position and also in advocating it in the ICAO machinery.
In the end, the industry found itself in the rare position of being praised by the Secretary General of the UN who said that aviation’s targets could be set as examples for other industries to follow.
Having fun with context sensitive ads
On 19/10/2009, in Viewpoint, by steve
Editing a blog has many interesting aspects, not the least of which is wrestling with the technology we are using to bring you nice and interesting stuff. If a picture is sometimes temporarily misaligned or the text wraps in a funny way, well, it is not us trying to innovate… It is the undocumented features in our tools that crop up here and there.
But context sensitive advertisements are the most fun by far!
Our regular readers will perhaps remember the big skyscraper ad on the right hand side of the main page that showed attractive ladies in various degrees of undress, alternatively proposing to find your new Ukrainian date or to conquer the world by playing on-line games… We do try to make ads as unobtrusive as possible while also ensuring that they are relevant and useful to our readers. Believe it or not, those ladies were generated by a piece of code supposed to react to the content of the blog and show ads that matched the content.
What is nanotechnology’s equivalent in air traffic management?
On 17/10/2009, in Viewpoint, by steve
It has been all over the trade press recently. 10 billion extra euros to go into French aeronautics research, the money coming from a planned public bond issue. Some of the fruits of this dough will come in the form of ground and flight demonstrations in the 2011-2014 time-frame and the primary aim of the effort is to meet the threat to Europe’s lead in the narrow-body aircraft area. Those new Chinese and Russian (not to mention Canadian) designs are being taken seriously and for good reason. Replacements for the A320 family and of course the 737 will be needed and probably sooner than later if Europe and the US wants to remain big players.
The line-up of planned demos is impressive. Replacing hydraulics with electrics, 15 % improvement in the performance of existing turbofan technologies, improved rotorcraft, and blended winglets… Airframes with nanostructure enhanced materials and intelligent skin and even new cockpits to mate up with SESAR and NextGen are also on the Agenda. All very good and timely.
Will training finally meet the future?
On 16/10/2009, in Viewpoint, by cleo
There are places in the world where ATIS (Automatic Terminal Information System) is still the hard to understand analogue affair, suffering not only from poor voice quality but also the multitude of accents their operators will dish out for you. Of course, somebody somehow will have approved them for use, poor quality, accent and all. Now talk to any organization that has installed a new type of digital ATIS and most of them will tell you horror stories (backed up by the manufacturers) about the new and in many cases totally unreasonable requirements such a digital system had to meet, supposedly to improve safety.
Safety is of course our primary concern but it is not served at all by allowing suspicions about the hidden gremlins in digital technology to drive requirements which are either not possible to meet or which drive up costs without contributing to safety. It is also counter productive to dream up new requirements simply because new digital versions of old tools “can do it”.
Whatever happened to (the benefits of) Mode S Enhanced Surveillance (EHS)?
On 14/10/2009, in Viewpoint, by cleo
Though there are few who will not be familiar with the term Mode S Enhanced Surveillance, let me quickly recap. Mode S is a legacy, ground based surveillance system which has a rudimentary data link capability. It is this latter that was being pushed in the 90s as a solution to all ills of air traffic management. Using the link capability, certain parameters from the aircraft, the so called DAPs, can be sent to the ground ATM system. Part of these are for display to the controller and part serve in theory to enhance system functions.
Back then the airspace users saw clearly that the benefit claims made for Mode S EHS were grossly overstated. It did not help that the first business case created for Mode S EHS was, to put it mildly, questionable. A later version showed more realistic figures but the damage was done.
We need pro-active safety
On 10/10/2009, in Viewpoint, by steve
After two aircraft collided over Zagreb on 10 September 1976, authorities in the region started to scramble, speeding up the introduction of more modern ATC equipment. The Uberlingen mid-air in 2002 highlighted several shortcomings in pilot training as well as ATC practices. Then we jump to 2009 and a crash near Buffalo in the US reveals not only that the captain of that flight had withheld important information from the airline about his previous performance shortcomings but also that the crew was operating in a fatigued state that would normally be too much for driving a car let alone flying an aircraft. A few months later, an Air France Airbus 330 crashes into the Atlantic Ocean and even without the flight data recorders, authorities point to a possible failure of the Pitot tubes on the aircraft (and an apparent failure to heed earlier warning signs from other aircraft) and possible training shortcomings limiting the crew’s ability to deal with an extremely complicated situation.
What is going on here? Mind you, the airlines and air traffic services providers involved in these incidents have safety policies and practices that meet the industry expectations. Yet, somehow those policies and practices were undercut with disastrous consequences.
High price to pay
On 23/09/2009, in Viewpoint, by steve
Driving to Brussels airport is easy these days and parking is a cinch. The new parking garages are ready and even the ridiculously narrow space between the hotel and the terminal (where were the airport planners when that thing was put there?) has been rearranged to make better use of what is available. Conspicuously missing though is the expanded European hub of DHL…
DHL had great plans for Brussels Airport, unfortunately all of them involving aircraft. They waited a long time while the airport, ministries, local and federal governments and who knows what other organizations wrangled, argued and made impossible claims and counter-claims. At the end, almost unnoticed among the general clamor, DHL packed up and moved to Leipzig where it was welcome to grow.
Space junk and global warming… Heads up!
On 18/09/2009, in Viewpoint, by steve
An Air France jet falls out of the sky over the Atlantic Ocean, pitot-tubes are blamed but otherwise there is little clue as to the cause. Several passengers and crew are injured when aircraft in cruise encounter severe turbulence. Tennis-ball size hail demolishes part of the historic wine-growing region in Hungary. Tornados ravage villages in Austria and forests in the Tatra Mountains in Slovakia… The list goes on.
True, clear air turbulence has been described decades ago, severe storms have happened before and the chance of space junk reaching altitudes where we fly is negligible. So we are ok. Or are we??
Fast trains and airplanes in China
On 27/08/2009, in Viewpoint, by steve
When we say High Speed Train, we tend to think of France and Japan first and foremost. We also know that there is a kind of love-hate relationship between those fast train companies and the airlines. Love is in the air, or rather on the tracks, when some Thalys trains run with an Air France flight number between Brussels and Paris Charles De Gaulle airport or when several of Germany’s ICE trains carry a LH number… But when trains take passengers away from certain flights instead of feeding the airline network, love changes to hate…
Xinhua photo
The competition war between air and high speed rail travel is being fought in several areas, some of which make the playing field anything but level. City centre to city centre or airport to airport, the nightmares of airport security and the lack of it on the trains, public money in the infrastructure against full cost recovery for the airlines… No one has figured out yet how best to make these two great forms of transport live with each other.
In 2009, China is investing 50 billion US dollars in the construction of the world’s biggest high speed train network. What are the airlines in China thinking?
Is the training of air traffic controllers better?
On 20/08/2009, in Viewpoint, by steve
One of the surprising and possibly unexpected early recommendations coming out of the investigation of the recent Air France Airbus 330 crash is that training in certain basic piloting skills and the handling of unusual situations must be strengthened and improved. Excuse me? Have we already reached the stage where the pilots of a sophisticated aircraft like the 330 are left wondering what to do when the screens go blank or numbers no longer add up?
One accident, however tragic, is probably not enough to draw far reaching conclusions on this thorny issue. But it does pose a question in a different context: is the training of air traffic controllers any better and is it keeping up with developments in the cockpit?
Cost/benefit analysis in ATM – blessing or curse?
On 14/08/2009, in Viewpoint, by steve
Many years ago we were enjoying the sun and a sandwich on Schiphol’s observation deck during lunch hour when news came that one of the major airlines there had a new top executive who was neither pilot, nor engineer. He was a bean-counter! I remember the initial feeling of horror and consternation at what back then appeared nothing short of blasphemy. Of course, in the years since we grew used to the idea that for leading an airline or car manufacturer successfully you did not necessarily have to know the difference between a car and an airplane. You had to understand the costs involved in making or operating them.
With the aviation industry, including airlines, ruled more and more by the need to cut costs to survive, having commercial, rather than engineering talent at the top seemed indeed an increasingly good idea. If only they had taught them to understand cost/benefit analyses properly!
Are we doing enough?
On 10/08/2009, in Viewpoint, by steve
Aviation Week and Space Technology, in their August 3 issue’s Market Focus commentary painted a very bleak picture of the US and European aerospace industry’s future. Referring to developments in China, they postulated that the 2010s may well be the last decade of US and European pre-eminence in the sector. This came on top of TIME magazines July 20 cover story “Generation Disappointment” by-lined: “Badly paid, unemployed and going nowhere. Why young Europe has so little to smile about.”
Only one of the stories is specifically about aviation but when a major magazine writes about “the broken hopes of a generation”, we should listen.
Air traffic management is not isolated from the troubles of the aerospace industry nor from the qualities, motivation and attitudes of the young people who will be entering the job market in coming years, some of whom might chose aviation and ATM in particular as the place to be.
Will they come because of the prospects and cutting edge nature of ATM or just because there is little else? Are we doing enough to make sure the reason is the former?
The CFMU – Valuable asset or problem for the future?
On 30/07/2009, in Viewpoint, by steve
Few people remember the days of horrendous delays in Europe caused by the explosive growth of demand in the latter part of the 70s and early 80s. States tried to cope with the problem as best they could but the individual efforts made things worse as often as they helped in resolving the logjam. Clearly, a region-wide solution was needed. This solution was the Central Flow Management Unit (CFMU), designed and operated by EUROCONTROL on behalf of the ECAC States and with the full blessing of ICAO.
Now, several decades later, the future of the CFMU as a concept and as an operating unit may hang in the balance.
From protecting sectors to ensuring flight efficiency
The first attempt at keeping the ATC system from falling apart under the relentless traffic peaks went under the tab “flow control”. Indeed, this was not much more than a crude quenching of traffic flows which did eliminate sector overloads but left hundreds of aircraft stranded on the ground, delays skyrocketing.
The commissioning of the CFMU brought not only a regionally centralised awareness of the overall situation but also a change in how sector overloads were prevented. The departure slots disbursed by the CFMU are based on several considerations, including alternative routings and aircraft operator preferences, justifying the claim that traffic flows are now being managed rather than just being constrained as in the days of basic flow control.
