By KRISTEN McTIGHE
Published: July 18, 2010
MADRID — At a time when calls for a single, centrally coordinated air traffic routing and control system are ringing loudly across Europe, Spain, like many other European Union countries, is struggling to meet agreed communitywide performance targets that cover safety, the environment, air traffic capacity and, notably, cost efficiency.
This performance-based approach is part of the second Single European Sky package, known as S.E.S. II, which took effect in December. The aim is not only to make European aviation more efficient, avoiding the sort of chaos caused, for example, by the eruption this year of an Icelandic volcano, but also to reduce costs that directly affect the Union’s global competitive edge.
So, the discovery last February that some Spanish air traffic controllers were paid as much as €900,000, or nearly $1.2 million, set off media outrage in a country with an unemployment rate of 20 percent, an average yearly salary of €18,087, and an economy among the weakest in Europe.
“Half earn more than double the salary of a government minister,” said an editorial in the newspaper El Mundo, which described the situation as “scandalous,” while an editorial cartoon showed Emilio Botín, the chairman of Banco Santander, Spain’s largest bank, studying to become an air traffic controller.
For the air traffic controllers, in contrast, the public demonization feels like a scapegoating campaign whipped up unfairly by the government, in part to hide its own failings.
“The public now has an image of us that is uninformed and we are trying to correct it,” said Daniel Zamit, spokesman of the Spanish air traffic controllers union, U.S.C.A. “The government has run a very good campaign against us.”
Mr. Zamit questions the salary figures presented by the government in February. But he also says that where high salaries are being paid, they are the result of extraordinary overtime worked with insufficient rest periods in an understaffed profession, conditions that the union has long denounced.
Underlying the polemic is a €300 million annual deficit at Aeropuertos Españoles y Navegación Aérea, A.E.N.A., the public body that manages Spain’s 48 state-run airports and pays controllers’ salaries. Faced with that, José Blanco, minister of public works and transport, said in February that pay levels had to come down. An immediate royal decree was issued to curb salaries, followed in April by permanent legislation.
“If we are not in agreement with the norms and the directives of the Single European Sky, we could be sanctioned as a country,” said Isabel Maestre, director of A.E.S.A., the Spanish air safety agency. “One of the problems we had was that the cost of our air navigation had evolved in an erratic and reckless manner. Not in Britain, France, Germany nor Italy were the costs as high.”
A major element of the government’s overhaul aims to lower the average annual salary by 40 percent, from €300,000, by regulating working patterns. Mr. Zamit rejects that approach, saying it will not solve the problem of over-long hours, despite promises by A.E.N.A. to recruit more controllers.
“When you have an evolution of costs that is skyrocketing and you don’t control the expenses, you are harming the competitiveness of all of Europe,” Ms. Maestre said. “This is one of the keys of the reform, and at the moment, the controllers won’t negotiate.”
Mr. Zamit says that future recruitment plans do not change the present work overload. He also says that A.E.N.A.’s financial problems are not caused by the controllers.
“The serious problem that A.E.N.A. has is that they have made investments in airports that have not been profitable,” he said. “They’ve opened many airports in places where people don’t fly, for political reasons, and now they have an enormous deficit.”
While the situation in Spain may be particularly tense, it is representative of a growing discontent and dysfunctionality in air traffic control across the Continent that is becoming more visible as countries move to implement the planned pan-European air traffic management system. Like Spain, many other countries are facing problems that have been long in the making and are not easy to solve.
“The issues at hand in Europe are not that simple, but if you look at the problem facing countries working towards the Single Sky project as a whole, it’s about controller capacity,” said Bo Redeborn, director for air traffic management strategies at Eurocontrol, the European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation — the agency working toward the pan-European air traffic management system.
The development of adequate controller capacity has been complicated by personnel shortages, and by no means only in Spain.
“There is one endemic problem that is nothing new with most air traffic providers in Europe, and that is that there is a chronic shortage of controllers,” said David Learmount, operations and safety editor of Flight International magazine, and an expert on aviation issues. “The state never invests money in air traffic control. It’s not a priority, and it’s not a vote winner.”
With controller shortages, governments have found it difficult to meet capacity benchmarks. They have responded, says Mr. Redeborn, in ways that have now produced a different set of problems.
“You can take the Spanish situation for example, where controllers have been paid incredibly high wages for working overtime,” Mr. Redeborn said. “When you do that, the willingness to work extra hours increases because of the money associated with it, and they managed to meet capacity needs by paying controllers high salaries.”
The problem is, Mr. Redeborn said, that paying out enormous salaries to paper over worker shortages is no longer compatible with the cost-efficiency targets of the Single European Sky.
This, he and others say, points to a fundamental flaw in the way the single skies project is being implemented.
“For me, it’s ridiculous,” said Volker Dick, president of the Air Traffic Controllers European Unions Coordination, the umbrella organization for European controllers’ labor unions.
“Countries like Germany, where they are implementing new systems, systems that are meant to improve air traffic control, are having tremendous delays,” Mr. Dick said. “Because of these delays, that come with putting in a system that will in the end make things more efficient, they will be subject to penalties, which no one really knows what they will be.”
Mr. Dick, argues that in the scramble to meet tough performance targets across the entire Europe airspace, the rights of controllers and their unions are being brushed aside.
“They insist on making these targets, then they put the rights of the unions aside to negotiate salaries, allowances, timing, schedules and whatnot,” he said. “This is not right.”
And, as a result of the pressures arising from the targets and the decisions being made to meet them, governments are meeting a backlash of resistance from controllers, who feel they have been left out of the planning process.
“We are seeing demonstrations from controllers that don’t like what the government, and service providers, are doing,” Mr. Redeborn said. “There are going to be more disturbances like this, like what we saw in France,” he added, referring to strikes by French air traffic controllers in February against the Single Sky initiative.
“Everyone is hammering on controllers, saying they are lazy and don’t work,” Mr. Dick said, “But we are the best experts at knowing what can reasonably be achieved and what cannot.
“Unfortunately, the European Commission hasn’t been willing to use our expertise. It decided that strongly regulating air traffic management would bring better results.”
