Safety Fears Over Europe’S Busy Skies
Every day there are more and more budget aircraft flying over Europe. But these cheap flights are
causing a real problem for air traffic controllers. The skies above Europe are becoming more and more congested. If the number of flights continues to increase, Europe’s skies will become full in just over ten years time. Current air traffic control systems will not be able to handle so many aircraft.
Many people are worried about the safety of Europe’s crowded skies. Two years ago two planes crashed over Lake Constance in Germany and 71 people died. The official report on the accident will probably say that a mistake by air traffic control caused the crash.
An air traffic control agency in Brussels called Eurocontrol coordinates all the take-off and landing times in 33 European countries. Every 24 hours,
Eurocontrol looks after 29,000 flights. Air travel decreased after September 11 2001, but Eurocontrol says that the amount of air traffic across Europe will
increase from 8 million flights a year to 16 million flights a year by 2020.
A few years ago the minimum height distance between aircraft in the sky was 2,000 feet. It is
now just 1,000 feet because of the large number of flights. At any time of the day there are 3,500 aircraft flying over Europe, carrying about 400,000
people. Budget airlines operate 10% of these flights. Some experts are worried that a lot of new budget airlines will come from east European countries
where the quality of air traffic control is not so good.
A large number of companies have entered the budget airlines market, including nine budget airlines in Germany alone. Next month a new
Hungarian airline, Wizz, will start operating flights from Luton in England to Budapest and to Katowice in Poland. The forecast is that there will be an increase in flights of 3% in Britain and 2.9% in France, but flights over Ukraine will
increase by 7%, over Belarus by 5.5%, over Turkey by 5.9% and over Bulgaria by 5%....
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