Punctuality further improved – Number of flights has been stagnating for seven years

Punctuality of air traffic in FABEC airspace has reached the best scores since 2006, yet the number of flights in the FABEC area has been stagnating since then. This, in a nutshell, is the message derived from the latest FABEC capacity report containing data for the year 2012.

Over the last three years, the service quality provided by the seven FABEC air navigation service providers ANA (Luxembourg), Belgocontrol (Belgium), DFS (Germany), DSNA (France), LVNL (Netherlands), MUAC (EUROCONTROL), and skyguide (Switzerland) has improved continuously. In this period, the en-route air traffic flow management delay per controlled flight decreased from 2.12 minutes in 2010 to 0.74 minutes in 2011 and then to 0.6 minutes in 2012. The total amount of delay minutes dropped from 11.34 million in 2010 to 4.13 million in 2011 to only 3.28 million in 2012. In 2012, only 3.11 percent (2011: 4.14 percent) of all 5.493 million controlled flights (2011: 5.597 million) experienced delays. This reduction in delay during 2012 amounts to an estimated saving of EUR 68.6 million when compared to the delays in 2011.

“When assessing the data, we have mixed feelings. On the one hand, we are satisfied with the excellent results for punctuality. But on the other hand, we are concerned about the air traffic development. The duration of the stagnation leads to the question whether this development is based on the financial crisis only or whether we have to consider first signals of saturation and/or traffic redistribution to other areas in the world,” said Daniel Weder, Chairman of the FABEC CEO Board. “In any case, we have to adapt our forecasts.”