Print

Mail

wiki links

Fears of chaos in Europe's skies increase

Skyguide, the Swiss air traffic control company in charge of directing the two planes that collided in mid-air over Germany a week, has reduced its air traffic control capacity by a fifth in a move which is likely to cause considerable delays to flights across Europe.

The decrease in traffic is an attempt to relieve pressure on Skyguide's air traffic controllers, who have been suffering from "extreme stress" since the accident in which a Russian Tupolev 154 and a Boeing 757 cargo jet slammed into each other over Lake Constance, company bosses said.

"They are used to stress in their work, but this is another kind of stress," said Philipp Seiler, a spokesman at Zurich Kloten airport.

"We are particularly concentrating on reducing traffic in the periods where there is a high concentration of around 40 planes an hour."

The announcement came as worrying details emerged of the chaos in the skies over Europe.

A leaked report from a pool of top German aviation experts revealed that 74 near-misses -- known as "Airprox" -- occurred in the skies over Germany last year. According to the report's authors -- from the transport ministry, civil aviation body, the air force and the national aviation accident investigation committee (BFU) -- 10 of the cases were classified as "acute," or "Airprox Category A."

The report, published in Sunday's Bild am Sonntag, described the German skies as being "busier than the motorways."

The acute shortage of air traffic controllers throughout Europe is adding to the problem of overcrowded skies, according to Marc Baumgartner, president of the umbrella organization for the world's air traffic controllers, the IFATCA.

German accident investigators have made public their reconstruction of the moments just before last week's crash, increasing the pressure on Swiss air authorities to explain the catalogue of apparent blunders which led up to the planes colliding at around 11,000m.

The sole air traffic controller on duty in Zurich at the time of the accident was struggling to survey five planes on two radar screens. The control tower's collision warning equipment was shut down at the time and the worker was using a faulty back-up telephone because the telephone network was down for maintenance work.

The controller, whose colleague was on a break as the accident occurred, gave the Russian pilot a warning of just 44 seconds to lower his altitude, deemed by experts to have been wholly inadequate.

Skyguide which is technically privatized but in which the Swiss government has a 99.85 percent stake, has admitted to communication failures, but has said questions about the two planes' warning systems need to be clarified before the true picture emerges.

German investigators said yesterday that the Swiss controller told the Tupolev airliner to descend, contradicting a warning from the Russian plane's computer that it should climb.

The BFU said the onboard TCAS crash avoidance system of the Tupolev had told the pilot to climb to avoid a collision with the Boeing cargo plane.

The Boeing's computer told the cargo jet's pilot to descend.

Both aircraft subsequently descended and collided.

TCAS, an abbreviation for Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System, is fitted in most large commercial jets. Its failure to prevent the crash had hitherto been a mystery in the investigation. The BFU said its information was based on an initial analysis of the voice recordings of the flight recorders of both aircraft.
This story has been viewed 2061 times.