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Safety and Operations
Accelerate progress towards aSingle Sky for Europe
EU governments have agreed that, by 2012, European airspace should be organised in functional blocks which are determined not by national boundaries but by traffic flows. Passengers will no longer suffer the levels of delay currently experienced and the elimination of circuitous routings, inefficient flight profiles and holding patterns could reduce Europe’s airlines’ carbon footprint by as much as 12%.
It was also agreed that performance targets for Air Traffic Management (ATM) should be set and monitored not by the navigation service providers, but by an independent regulator. In addition, a public-private-partnership programme called SESAR was established to develop the technology which will replace the current patchwork of systems currently in use. But implementing SESAR cannot be financed by airlines alone therefore public funding is required.
These fundamental changes will make ATM better, more efficient, and cheaper, whilst maintaining extremely high levels of safety.
European airlines call upon EU instituions and the Member States to accelerate progress towards a Single European Sky.