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A new air traffic-control system designed to double the number of planes over Europe while cutting flight times and airport congestion was put into operation by the continent’s aviation agency Monday. The system is meant to eliminate the necessity for planes to travel along "air lanes" corresponding to lines of ground-based radio beacons. The lanes have become the equivalent of aerial highways — flights are funneled in at one end and then wait in line to land at the other.
Using Global Positioning Systems that track planes using satellites, the new system will eliminate the reliance on the radio beacons. Instead of placing a flight into an air lane, an air traffic controller can pick from a wide variety of routes between airports. By increasing the number of flights in the air while reducing wait times over airports, the new technology will save airlines about euro4 billion euros ($5 billion) a year in wasted fuel, according to the agency, Eurocontrol. It is also meant to increase safety.
It will also allow for "continuous descent approaches," a technique whereby the aircraft essentially glide down to the runway from their cruise altitude, rather than face a series of step-down descents and speed changes. Experts say this too would save significant quantities of fuel. A similar network is being set up in the United States by the Federal Aviation Administration.
The new flight-data processing system, based in Maastricht, the Netherlands, will initially control traffic only over Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and northwest Germany. Ultimately, it will spread to all regions of the continent, said Mireille Roman, a spokeswoman for Eurocontrol. Some 1.5 million flights are handled by the Maastricht Center each year, making it the second-busiest control center after London.
Experts predict that air traffic in Europe will double by 2030, increasing from the current 10 million flights per year to 20.4 million. Eurocontrol said the new system should be fully operational by 2025. William Voss, head of the Flight Safety Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Alexandria, Virginia, said that both the European and the U.S. systems will be major advances. But he said the current economic crisis may delay their full implementation.
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