European Air Traffic Management Challenges and Solutions by EUROCONTROL, Head of Airspace & Capacity Division, Razvan Bucuroiu

Transcript

Razvan Bucuroiu:So, a very good morning from my side. My name is Razvan Bucuroiu. I work for EUROCONTROL. I'm working in the network manager area of EUROCONTROL, leading the area that deals with airspace and capacity arrangements. I'm very honored to be here in this CAPA event on behalf of our Director General, Mr. Raúl Medina. Thank you, Razvan. It is very important to be with you here and to exchange some views on what is going on with the air traffic management in Europe. Eurocontrol is an organization that covers more than 42 states. We start from Iceland in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and we end up in Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, etc. So it's a very, it's a very big area that has a blend of complexities with EU member states, NATO member states, non-EU member states, non-NATO member states. A lot of complex arrangements. And we are there to organize and to manage air traffic control, air traffic management in Europe. And we are there also to serve you, because if you would not be there, air traffic management would not be needed. And you are our customers. This is why it is very important for us to work in a very, very close partnership with you. And this is why this morning I'm going to share with you a number of challenges that we have right now and that we will have in the future, and why it is so important to work together to address those challenges and to see how we can move, how we can move forward. So first of all, what is important to know is that we might expect in a peak summer day in 2030 about 45,000 flights in Europe. The peak that we have reached was 37,500 flights in the summer of 2019, and this was, this was quite a lot. Uh, 45,000 flights means a very, a very high traffic, traffic density, a very high traffic demand, and this requires a number of things to be looked into. And I made the selection of the most important elements that we have to work together and to look into together, uh, for next year but also for the years to come. And those are 5 of them. First of all, what is important to say and to be humble and recognize it is that air traffic demand is increasing slightly faster than capacity. There is a conservatorism in the way in which air traffic management evolves in, in Europe, and the capacity that the air traffic management offers unfortunately is not well always aligned with the evolution of the traffic demand. We have to say also that from a technological point of view, there is no magic solution in the next 5, 6, 7 years. There are new concepts, there are very new innovative technologies on which, on which work is ongoing in the innovation areas. But they will not be implemented as such in the next 5, 6, 7, uh, 7 years. And then we will have to work together to see how we can address the challenges, those challenges that, that we have, which kind of solutions we have, uh, we have in hand. This technological evolutions, again, unfortunately, because you all know from your own experiences in the airline world that we are an extremely regulated industry, and because of this probably very, very significant regulation that is done, of course, for good safety reasons, sometimes it takes a little bit too long to modernize this, this industry. Let's look first at the solutions. So the first area is the high traffic growth. And the new military and civil requirements. Ladies and gentlemen, let's see a little bit how the numbers, how the traffic in Europe has evolved. If you look at the global numbers, that would be a little bit unfair because of some of the crises ongoing now in Europe or in the neighborhood. Overall, we did not reach yet the traffic levels of before 2019, of before the COVID crisis. We are somehow 2% less than we used to be in 2019, but we also have the Ukrainian war, we have the sanctions that have been imposed, What I can tell you is that if we would not have all those events, the traffic that those areas of concern today generates in and out of Europe represents about 5,000 flights per day in the peak summer season. This year, we would have been close to 41,000 flights if this crisis would not have happened. These 45,000 flights is not something that that is unrealistic. And even, even without that, we still believe that this evolution till 2030 could happen. But the issue is that despite the fact that we do not— we did not reach yet the 2019 levels of traffic globally, the geographical distribution of traffic demand in Europe is completely different. So on this map, wherever you see green and darker nuances of green, it means that the traffic is already above 2019. So if you look into the German upper airspace, into Spain, Portugal, into Central Europe— Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, etc.— the traffic is already above 2019 levels. And it is not above by little. In some areas, it's 30 to 50% more than in 2019. So over a period of 5 years, to have a traffic growth of 30 to 50% represents an unprecedented traffic growth for those areas. And this is not due to the avoidance routes because of the war in Ukraine. No, this is genuine traffic growth. And of course, when you experience such a high traffic growth, you need to, you need to take accelerated measures in order to respond to this, to this growth. And this is what we expect by 2029, basically exactly in the same areas, a traffic growth of above, of around 25% above what we have experienced this year. So that, that remains really, really solid. For instance, we are now in the heat of the preparation of the summer 2025, and based on your schedules that we are, we are using extensively and we are receiving from a very, very high number of airlines, we look for next year to a traffic growth of about 5 to 6% above 2024. Yet again, in the traditional years before 2019, a solid, economically solid traffic growth was around 3-4%. Now for next year, we talk about something 5-6% in the overall European airspace. Again, this traffic growth is going to happen in central, southwest, and southeastern part of Europe. How we are trying to, uh, to address this, because having in advance the knowledge of what is exactly the traffic growth, we have our own economical forecasts in Eurocontrol, but nothing is better than getting the information directly from you. So since the start of the COVID crisis, because it was very much unknown how, how the traffic demand will, will develop, we made arrangements with about 360 airlines operating in the European airspace to receive their schedules directly. And we are receiving updates to those schedules on a weekly basis, and we make the updates of the traffic outlook on a weekly basis. Initially, those schedules were received with an anticipation of 8 weeks. Now, because of the very difficult summer 2024 season in terms of traffic growth, in terms of capacity delivery, weather, etc. We wanted now to understand better from you which is actually the traffic demand for the summer 2025, and we have requested a more anticipated provision of your expectations for, uh, for next summer. And actually, while receiving your schedules, we have seen that they match very well our high traffic growth forecast scenario. It's not the medium term, it's not the medium scenario, is the high traffic growth scenario. Actually, it's around 5.5 to 6% traffic growth for, uh, for next year. We have automated these processes, and I can tell you, if this can be communicated earlier to the air navigation service providers, despite the challenges that they have also— and I will come to that— they are able to find some mitigation actions for the next, for the next summer season to address better your expectations. Unfortunately, also, you are not the only ones. You are not— you are— there are other customers in the network, and those are the military. And especially under the current circumstances, military requirements, as you can imagine, they are growing. And those are the military areas in Europe. I just want to reassure you that they are not all of them active at the same time, and we have an extremely dynamic process that we call in our jargon flexible use of airspace, in which we exchange in real time information and data with our military partners in order to know at whichever, at whichever moment in time which military areas become available for civil traffic. And this dynamicity, we are working on it also with the civil users because we would like you to make a much better use of this airspace when it becomes available for the civil, for the civil utilization. Of course, there are a lot of automation challenges on your, on your side, a lot of reactivity challenges. I would I would say you work in an extremely automated environment. But sorry to bring it to such a low level, you still have a very good group of professionals there called the flight dispatchers that we would like a little bit more of them, actually, of those professionals to be involved in the utilization of this airspace. And not just to look at the very, let's say, probably less dynamic way in which then you provide to us your flight plans. This is the current situation. Unfortunately, you are all aware that new weapons will be deployed, 5th-generation fighters, and those will require even bigger areas than those. And this is what we are actually looking into, to integrate all these requirements between 2025 and 2029, and to have even a more dynamic utilization of the airspace, because some of those areas will just grow. So we will need to work much, much closer with you. And last but not least, we have another category of users that we call the new entrants, the high-altitude operations. The launching of commercial satellites. And you can see here, uh, the new sites in the world, but also what is expected to be implemented in Europe. And whenever these operations will take place, they will require airspace segregation. We will handle them like the military operations, basically. But those have the specificity that they happen in a very, very big area but in a very short period of time. They also have the specificity that after the launch you have to deal with the debris, you have to, to see how you protect the civil airspace users from, from this. So again, here we are working now on the integration of their requirements and on implementing exactly the same processes like for the military to handle those operations when, when they will happen. And they are both civil and military, but there will be more and more civil operations in this sense. Another challenge that I would like to, to address with you is the volatility of the traffic and the geopolitical instability. I think the last 5 years were probably the most dynamic years that we ever had in the aviation industry and in air traffic management in Europe. Because events have happened— COVID, then we had the war in Ukraine, and it's not yet over. We had a lot of crises in the area surrounding the European airspace in the Middle East, and all this in minutes, in really minutes, just send the traffic flows in Europe in different areas. And those are just 2 exemplifications. Here on the left-hand side, you see what has happened during the peak of the conflict in the Middle East and how we had to take— on the blue routes, you see where the traffic used to be, and on the red, yellow, orange where the traffic has moved, and we have to make arrangements for those in less than 1 hour. And this, you can see that traffic moving out of Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, it moves afterwards to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Cyprus, Greece, etc., in a completely different traffic distribution, and we have to handle this. And then on the other graph You see the impact of the, of the war in Ukraine and how traffic flows have now to, um, to reroute, to go around, and how much complexity this brings into the interfaces with the Belarusian and Ukrainian airspace, also taking into consideration that there we have extremely intense military activity. But again, I would just like to reassure you that the network dynamicity deals with that. We have extremely well-settled crisis arrangements that we activate in a matter of minutes. We have very good connections with the other regions. I am personally a member also of the Middle East Crisis Coordination Cell, and I can tell you the number of events that we had there lately was just unbelievable. And whenever we have a situation like that, we put in place the contingency measures. We call teleconference. I think probably it lasts plus minus 1 hour until the moment when everything is prepared and we call the teleconference. On the last one that we had, uh, on this, uh, on this Middle East crisis, we had 350 airline participants in the teleconference. On an evening, organized a teleconference at 8 o'clock in the evening. Now, another, another challenge that, that we have obviously is the structural capacity issues that, that we have in Europe. We have literally structural capacity shortfalls that need to be addressed. We need to increase the airspace capacity for your operations, but we also have a number of aspects where we have a suboptimal utilization of the existing capacity and their airlines and navigation service providers together with ourselves, we need to get together much better in order to make a better use of what is available in the airspace. And we are tackling this basically in 3 phases, um, on— for next summer, for the medium term, and strategically. For next summer, we look basically into 5 areas, and those areas are first of all delivering the agreed capacities. We need to make sure that what is promised is delivered. This was not really the case during the summer 2024, and we have 5 air navigation service providers who did not make their commitments, and that happened at a very short term and without too much notice. Uh, weather is becoming a major issue. I will come I will come to that challenge a little bit in the next slides. Weather is getting much, much worse, and unfortunately, we need again to find ways together on how to address it. We look at the schedules, at your turnaround times, because this needs to be realistic. Your demand needs to remain predictable and achievable. We want to prioritize the first rotation so that flights do not get delayed later in the day because that has a very bad knock-on effect. And also a disciplined flight plan execution. We don't want you to change flight plans at the last moment because this leads to this suboptimal use of the airspace capacity. And as we speak, we are having probably 3, 4 meetings per day with various ANSPs in order to prepare next summer, but we are addressing also all the other challenges. In the medium term, the 2 areas that need to be urgently addressed is recruitment of air traffic controllers. And I think we are all in a little bit the same situation. It's very difficult, more and more difficult to find qualified people who want to do such a work. It's more and more difficult, unfortunately. And we are entering now into a phase of massive retirement because it's a big generation that will, that will retire, and we need to exploit much better the airspace. You know, in Europe we have Schengen, we can travel without passport control. Why don't we have Schengen in the airspace? And this is what we are going to look shortly in the, uh, in this medium term. We have looked into what will be required in terms of air traffic controller numbers, but which other solutions need to be addressed. And actually, it is, um, it is impressive. And this is where the work needs to concentrate. First of all, all the air navigation service providers in Europe need to continue with intensive recruitment, and hopefully they will find the staff to recruit. 80% of the air traffic control centers in Europe require a redesign of the airspace in the next 5 years. Luckily, not all of them at the same time, but in the next 5 years, almost all the entire air European airspace needs to be again completely redesigned. And as a result of that, we will need more sectors to control traffic. And as we have evaluated now the current recruitment plans of the air navigation service providers, 60% of them need to be reinforced. So it will be a big amount of work to be, to be run and to have a good understanding with yourselves also that this might have a little bit of financial implications also. The ATM modernization— we are looking in 3 priorities in the ATM modernization. First of all, the open digital architecture. Air traffic control systems in Europe are too customized. You cannot have a single solution that is deployed in several places. Each and every air traffic control system is so customized that you cannot accelerate air traffic control modernization. This is where we are looking now. We need to accelerate that. We need to standardize that in a much better way. Then air-ground integration. We need to transfer, we need to automate tasks that air traffic controllers are executing in order to decrease their workload and to be able to increase their productivity and to increase the airspace throughput. And again, in a continuous manner, this seamless airspace organization where there are— there is still, even with the traditional means of air traffic control, to squeeze more in terms of capacity. Ladies and gentlemen, the last point that I would like to address with you is the weather. There were a lot of claims during the summer 2024 that weather has been misused to hide the lack of air traffic capacity in Europe. It is very, very debatable. We recognize that it is a structural lack of capacity in, in Europe, but weather is much, much worse. In— during the summer 2024, from 1st of June till 30th of August, we have 30% more bad weather days than during the same period in summer 2024. And what is even worse is the fact that in 2023 we had 18 days of extreme bad weather. Extreme bad weather means thunderstorms, thunderstorm cells that are spread across a very big area in Europe. So we had 18 days during summer 2023 and 34 days in summer 2024. So out of the 90 days of the summer, one-third were actually with extreme bad weather. And this is not Eurocontrol data, it's EUMETNET data, the— our, our meteorological provider. And to be honest, there were moments during the peak of the summer season where in some areas air traffic control had to run traffic under a very strict monitoring and, uh, of course covering all the safety requirements, reducing the legal separation between aircraft. And we had instances, you know very well, that the separation, the vertical separation between 2 aircraft is 1,000 feet. We had moments when they did not have any solution because of the small corridors that they had between bad weather where they had to do under very strict radar control, 500 feet separation. This is what we are talking about. I think altogether, and we are putting in place now elements to ensure a more dynamic management of the weather in the network and to make sure also that we have a common understanding local with the states, with the NSPs, and with yourselves, of which are going to be the agreed weather scenarios, the agreed weather forecast that we are going to use in a very dynamic manner in order to manage the network. But that again will require a lot your help. I know I have been 3, 4, 5 minutes more than the required time, but I just wanted to take a little bit of time to explain you these challenges. To thank you again for, uh, for accepting our intervention today, and just to reassure you that this intensive partnership that we are putting in place will continue to be there. And we count on your support, and we count on you to grow traffic, because this helps the aviation industry in Europe. Thank you very much.

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