Forty seven near misses.

The Performance Review report for 2010 has just been published. It highlights one main point regarding safety, but first let me tell you, to my knowledge, how the reports are done. If you are really interested you can check the Eurocontrol PRR 2010, available on the internet. I am obviously only going to disclose the important data from my (admittedly biased) position.
That said, the data Eurocontrol publishes has previously been forwarded by the Air Navigation Service Providers, they usually follow Eurocontrol criteria for category classification, and they are also usually backed by the expertise of the national safety supervising authority (in Spain, AESA, Agencia Española de Seguridad Aérea). There are occasional discrepancies from the general rule, but basically the data is perfectly comparable.
Regarding the classification criteria, suffice it to say that, to avoid being too technical, they are class A (near collision), class B (Safety not guaranteed), and others. Either of the two former are very serious incidents. Of course, where humans operate the system, mistakes are prone to occur. So I’ll just give you the data for class A incidents for countries comparable to Spain and let you arrive at your own conclusions.
France ---14
Germany --- 4
UK (Nats) --- 0
SPAIN --- 47
I was going to leave it there, but Aena adds a line saying that none of the Spanish near collisions was due to ATM (Air Traffic Management). Yes, I also wondered at first whether pilots had just gone berserk and had decided to ram into each other. Obviously, our magnificent management staff had just decided that having Spanish controllers work half as much more than British or German controllers, or calling them for duty on their day off (compulsory attendance, remember), or cancelling their holidays once their plane tickets and hotels were booked, or leaving them for years on end without touching a simulator, or allowing one day’s rest out of each six; or endorsing their English level, not because they had had enough training but because they have never been entangled in a language related incident before, had nothing to do with their professional capacity.
Fortunately, we know the figures and we are doing our best to improve safety, but it isn’t easy. I’ll write about that soon.

Traffic Regulations

I am aware that most of my readers are aviation specialists, but some are not. Therefore I apologise for some layman explanations I sometimes prefer to make.
Air traffic control basically is no more than the surveillance of traffic flow to ensure that safety is always guaranteed along the flight path. National airspaces are covered by different companies (ANSPs), usually just one per country. Then they are divided into different regions (FIR, Flight Information Regions). Each one of these is usually managed from one workplace (Control Centre), which, in turn, is subdivided into different sectors, each one managed by one team of controllers, comprising from one to three ATCOs. Sometimes (in low traffic periods, such as night-times) these sectors are merged, forming a new sector, with a different name.
Each sector (or resulting sector) has a declared maximum overall capacity, which has theoretically been determined through workload studies, considering optimum conditions. When being licensed, controllers train in a simulator that reproduces the normal traffic flow. The trainees commence with a low traffic exercise and increase their skill by increasing traffic until the maximum capacity (or even further in simulators) and then contingencies are introduced). These could be anything from a radio failure to aircraft in an emergency, bad weather, ash clouds, malfunctioning equipment such as radar or radio beacons, etc. It could also be industrial action or, even fatigued ATCOs.
Controllers are not endorsed until they prove they can manage any situation that could crop up. As you may have guessed, many of these contingencies would reduce the maximum capacity of any given sector where real traffic is concerned.
That’s where regulations enter the picture. Obviously a traffic in emergency (as the name suggest) appears suddenly, and controllers have to improvise. If proper training has been undertaken, improvisation will be kept to a minimum.
But poor weather can usually be forecast, and therefore measures can be taken to reduce sector capacity. These will involve delaying take-off times or modifying flight plan levels or even routes. These are the so called regulations. They can also apply in conjuction with other circumstances (on the job training, illness, equipment failure…)
The local Flow management unit works closely together with Eurocontrol Central Flow Management Unit. Sophisticated computers calculate how each glitch in different airspaces affects any given flight, and calculates, with amazing precision, how much traffic will affect certain sector at a given time.
Where I work, in Madrid, the local flow management unit is situated in a corner of the operations room, and supervisors and the head can easily access the data (workload patterns) that flow management officers have at their disposal. But that is about to be a thing of the past.
Te flow unit is going to be removed from the operations room, to complicate matters for supervisors and controllers, to make it harder to regulate when the weather gets tough, to avoid controllers being aware of their impending workload. Once again, Efficiency before Safety.
Sadly, even considering that Spain has a pretty poor aviation safety record, the authorities can afford loss of lives, but not of money. Even so, they’re mucking it all up, as I will show in my next post.