EUROCONTROL and operational stakeholders finalise plan to manage summer traffic in a context of increasing traffic and capacity constraints

Brussels, Belgium - Traffic so far this year is up 5% on 2024 and this trend is expected to continue throughout the summer months with traffic growth spread asymmetrically across the continent. Combined with a lack of air traffic control capacity in some parts of Europe, this will make this summer complex and challenging.

To mitigate the impact of such a challenging situation, the EUROCONTROL Network Manager has agreed with its operational stakeholders a detailed plan based on five key elements:

• Delivering the agreed capacity
• Minimising the impacts of adverse weather
• Filing realistic flight plans – and sticking to them
• Prioritising the first rotation
  Ensuring that flight schedules are realistic

The plan, if followed by all operational partners, reduces potential delays from an average of 2.44 minutes per flight to 2.02 minutes per flight, which still remains far beyond the target set in the EU Performance Plan of 0.9 minutes per flight.

Delays of 2.02 minutes per flight are equivalent to approximately 70,000 minutes of delay for the day as a whole and can be expected to translate to 15-20 minutes of delay per delayed flight.

Additional disruptions, such as severe weather conditions, are likely to push the delay figures even higher. A single day with more than 200,000 minutes of overall delay could have a cost impact of approximately €20 million for airspace users and will translate to 30 minutes or higher of delay per delayed flight.

EUROCONTROL’s Director of Network Management, Iacopo Prissinotti, commented “There are already capacity shortages in the control centres at Marseille, München, Karlsruhe, Athinai, Makedonia, Budapest, Barcelona, Sevilla and Zagreb, so we know this summer will be difficult. It is now essential that we focus, think and act as a European network and that each individual stakeholder delivers what is agreed in the plan so we can try to make the summer as efficient as possible for the travelling public.”

More detail can be found in this Flash Briefing on Summer 2025 preparations.