Europe: Air traffic chief warns of worsening flight delays

European airlines’ unwillingness to invest sufficiently in air traffic control has led to record flight delays that will get worse this summer, a senior industry figure has said. Jeff Poole, director-general of Canso, which represents global air traffic managers, said: “The airlines don’t like to hear this message — the lack of investment is largely due to the regulatory framework over recent years, where the emphasis has been on keeping costs down and not investing for the future.” The EC regulates how much air traffic controllers can charge airlines, which used to demand a focus on “costs, costs, costs”, said Poole, “but now the message from airlines is ‘capacity, capacity, capacity’.” He added that the entire industry needed to work together to solve ATC problems. Flight delays in Europe more than doubled last year to a total of 19.1m minutes last year as airlines and air traffic controllers failed to hit EU performance targets, according to figures from Eurocontrol, which co-ordinates national air traffic management agencies. The average delay per flight was 1.73 minutes in 2018 against EU performance targets of half a minute. Summer 2019 will be at least as bad as last year, Poole added, despite recent investment: “I’d like to be optimistic but I don’t believe I can be... It’s going to be a tough message this summer to say to people, ‘Yeah, we know it’s as bad as last year but look at all the tremendous work we’ve done.’”<br/>