Merger leads way in EU bid to rationalise airspace, allowing use of new technology to add capacity and make big savings for airlines, writes Gerry Byrne

AS DUBLIN airport slowly creaked back to normal following the catastrophic failure of its radar system last month, it was difficult to believe that Ireland is actually at the forefront of a brave new world in air traffic management.

It is a world where radar is becoming redundant, where aircraft are now communicating with controllers by e-mail and where, indeed, controllers no longer control and pilots take back the responsibility for safe navigation.

Welcome to what the Americans call NextGen and the somewhat less poetic Europeans refer to as Sesar, (for Single European Sky Air traffic management Research), a €30 billion investment programme.

When the latest Europe-wide round of improvements to radar and landing aids is complete, it will be nigh impossible to fit any more aircraft into Europe's overcrowded skies.

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAN) has estimated that air traffic delays are costing airlines in the US and passengers $9 billion annually.

However, exciting new systems, representing a quantum leap in technology, are ready and waiting. Capacity can be tripled, pollution reduced by 10 per cent, air traffic costs halved and safety improved tenfold. According to one estimate, airlines will save an average €400 in fuel alone on each flight. But is Europe ready

Continental Europe is a patchwork quilt of air traffic control areas governed by politics, not logic, and it gets crazier as each new accession state joins. For years, countries have resisted the consolidation of Europe's airspace as much as they have bickered over and delayed the introduction of a uniform technology that can simplify traffic management.

Eurocontrol, the European Union body attempting to rationalise air traffic control, wants to create just eight functional airspace blocs to replace more than 50 air traffic regions.

Ireland has already taken the bold step of merging its air space with that of Britain to produce the first new functional airspace block for 50 years. Traffic over both islands and for several hundred miles into the Atlantic is now managed from just four air traffic management centres.

The slow pace of formation of other blocks has led to threats from Europe that, unless the bottom-up approach accelerates, it will impose the blocks on member states in order to achieve its target of a single EU sky by 2012.

Only when airspace has been rationalised can new technology be installed, and here the Americans, with no regional turf wars to be fought, have taken an early lead.

Following successful trials in Alaska, where the lethal bush pilot accident rate was reduced by 40 per cent, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is now rolling out its NextGen programme to other areas. It is already operational in Louisville and North Carolina, and will shortly appear in Philadelphia and Miami.

In the radar-starved Gulf of Mexico, where aircraft are now spaced 150 miles apart for safety, NextGen-equipped jetliners will soon fly nose to tail with a separation of just five miles.

At the forefront of the new air traffic frontier is a system called Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast or ADS-B, which threatens to overturn the dominant role played by radar at airports such as Dublin and, indeed, throughout the world.

While modern radar can plot an aircraft's position and trajectory, it is less accurate with distance.

GPS-equipped aircraft, on the other hand, know where they are to within metres and, using ADS-B, broadcast this accurate information direct to traffic management centres and to other aircraft.

It is so precise that more aircraft can be safely packed into the same area of sky and, using a sophisticated form of anti-collision equipment, navigate safely around other aircraft without the aid of controllers.

Where necessary, controllers can direct pilots via Datalink, a sort of aerial e-mail, thus doing away with radio and its potential for fatal misunderstandings.

Of most interest to airlines, however, is that jets will be able to navigate more directly to their destinations without having to take complicated zig-zags through convoluted airspace, saving both time and fuel.

The only constraint on their journey may be the availability of runway space.

The FAA reckons that NextGen and its attendant technologies will be widespread across the US by the middle of the next decade.

Eurocontrol, on the other hand, is suggesting that, unless the single European sky becomes a reality sooner, it may be 2020 by the time Sesar is fully rolled out across Europe.

The delay can only prove costly for all Europe's economies, as aircraft continue to navigate from one antediluvian radio beacon to another.

Anglo-Irish co-operation in merging airspace, on the other hand, may well prove a more useful beacon for Europe to follow.