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. Leer más
