Foreward - Is this the best we can do?

zby Duncan auld, IFATCA President & CEO

Welcome to 2021 – the first post pandemic year, if we can call it that. We begin this year with enthusiasm, anticipation, a lot of hope, and a little caution. We are happy to put 2020 behind us. We have a few vaccines that are approved for use, and we expect our governments to coordinate a rapid, fair, and effective vaccination rollout.

As much as we may want to forget about 2020 and move on, we cannot, and we must not. There are lessons to be learned here. In the tradition of safety in aviation, we must take time to analyse what happened and how we can do better next time.

Safety in aviation is designed with resilience to failure in mind. Our critical equipment, operational procedures, and professional personnel are designed to be redundant, reliable, and failsafe. It has become painfully obvious during the past 12 months that this safety-based approach has not been extended to the financing of air navigation service providers. This is evidenced by air navigation service providers (ANSPs) in multiple regions taking extreme measures to remain solvent during the pandemic, all the while providing a necessary public service to their respective nation. This will come back to bite us. The general public – yearning to break free from more than a year of confinement – will – when the conditions are right – swarm to the skies. And ANSPs will not be ready for it. Then, as usual, the operational staff will be criticised for lack of efficiency, and various programs will be trialled at great expense to improve capacity. These programs will deliver little, whereas some investment in personnel would have achieved greater results for less, if these organisations had not been so short sighted and trigger happy.

While not to the same extreme, we have seen this before. But the boom-bust cycle in ANSP funding and by extension ATM investment in infrastructure and personnel is not a statistical anomaly. If this were an ATM operation that repeated the same mistake, we would have changed long ago, but in many countries, we tolerate a substandard funding model with a single point of failure. Why? Do we really believe there is no other option? Some nations still operate as a government funded model, and some are hybrid systems. These funding models are not perfect either, but they are arguably more reliable than those where income is based only on aviation charges. T h e industry needs to take a long hard look at the various ATM funding models and ask ourselves, “Is this the best we can do?” It might be time to admit that the utopia of completely ‘commercialised’ ATM was a fantasy and focus on a hybrid model based on the best of both worlds.

After all, throughout the pandemic, air traffic control and all the ANSPs have continued to provide their critical role as a public service to civil aviation, supporting the transport of cargo, medical supplies, and medical personnel, even when passenger traffic has ceased. Maybe it is time to recognise it for more than just a burden, but a means to provide the safety and security of the state. Is that not worth some investment? y

Credit: Ellen Jenni via unsplash.com

z Photo: Grounded Swiss planes during COVID-19 at the military airport of Dübendorf