EUROCONTROL’s PRC publishes PRR for 2017
Air traffic in Europe continued to increase for the fourth year in a row in 2017, taking the number of flights to 10.6 million – the highest level on record.
At the same time, safety levels remained high in Europe with one reported accident with direct ATM contribution and none with indirect ATM contribution in 2017.
ATFM delays continued to increase in 2017. Overall, 5.3% of flights were affected by en-route ATFM delays in 2017 (up from 4.8% in 2016) with an average delay of 16.5 minutes per delayed flight. The main drivers of en-route ATFM delays were ATC capacity/staffing constraints and adverse weather.
The PRC chairman, Ralph Riedle, commented: “While the continuous improvement in cost-efficiency is to be welcomed, if we take the economic view (ie combining provision and delay costs), we see that a significant part of the cost-efficiency savings are being offset by the sustained increase in ATFM delay costs. This reflects concerns expressed by the PRC in previous reports that delays would increase again, unless sufficient attention was focussed on capacity planning and deployment.”
The PRR 2017 is available here .
To facilitate and support discussions on ANS performance, the independent PRC is continuously improving its online portal at http:/ansperformance.eu to make relevant performance data available to interested stakeholders as soon as possible.
