ATC and Air Traffic Control News, Blogs, and More

The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating a mystery in the sky. A mysterious object flying over Denver nearly caused a mid-air collision Monday evening. As far as investigators know, the mystery object did not show up on radar Monday. Investigators believe this object, whatever it is, could pose a serious safety hazard to planes.
The pilot is heard telling air traffic control: "A remote controlled aircraft, or what? Something just went by the other way ... About 20 to 30 seconds ago. It was like a large remote-controlled aircraft.
The corporate jet, a Cessna Citation 525 CJ1, was flying at 8,000 feet above sea level over Cherry Creek when the mystery object came close enough to make any pilot nervous.
"That's an issue because now we have something in controlled airspace that poses a danger," Former NTSB Investigator and KUSA Aviation Analyst Greg Feith said.

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Cash-strapped air traffic control authorities are warning airlines that any efficiency savings derived from unifying Europe’s most heavily congested airspace will be far less than previously promised due mainly to a sharp drop in traffic levels.
Even so, the leaders of the FABEC functional airspace block that is designed to unify the complex airspace of Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland insist that the Single European Sky initiative is still worth pursuing.
Most major European airports and major civil airways and military training areas are located in FABEC airspace which covers 1.7 million km. FABEC currently handles around 5.5 million flights per year which accounts for 55 per cent of all European air traffic.

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Flight delays caused by NATS air traffic control have been cut by 99 per cent in 10 years to an all-time low level.
Figures for February to April 2012 show the average NATS air traffic control (ATC) delay was down to 1.4 seconds per flight, the lowest figure since records began in the mid-1990s.
That compares to an average delay of 132.1 seconds 10 years ago. NATS’ introduction of new technology and smarter utilisation of staff has contributed to the steady decrease in delays.
In total there was only 11,278 minutes of NATS ATC delay during February, March and April of this year across more than 497,000 flights handled. In 2002 the figure was more than 994,000 minutes of delay for nearly 452,000 flights.

Air-traffic controllers in the New York area slept on the job, watched movies on duty, left work early and repeatedly violated safety rules, a U.S. investigative agency told the White House and Congress.
Controllers at the facility that monitors traffic in a radius of about 50 miles (80 kilometers) around New York also used "careless and casual language" in communications with pilots, leading to at least one serious incident when planes got too close, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which investigates whistle-blower complaints, said in a letter today.
A separate complaint investigated by Special Counsel Carolyn Lerner charged that planes departing Teterboro Airport in New Jersey routinely got too close to jets flying to Newark Liberty International Airport, according to the letter.

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A federal investigative report faults air traffic control at the Honolulu airport for the near-collision of two jets over Hawaii in January, saying the worker who mistakenly set the aircraft on a collision course was inexperienced.
A video radar display of the incident shows a Japan Airlines Boeing 767 passenger jet and a United Parcel Service MD-11 as they headed straight for each other at hundreds of miles per hour. There was no altitude separation between the planes at one point, and they traveled within about 1 1/2 miles of each other.
When the controller realized what was happening, he directed the Japan Airlines plane to descend, according to the report. He told investigators his attention was diverted to a potential conflict involving two other planes.

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Air Traffic controllers at Melbourne Airport have been sent for extra training to ensure two incidents where airliners became too close as they climbed after successive take-offs will not happen again.

The extra training and an Air Services Australia review of procedures was sparked by an initial incident in December 2010 when a Qantas Boeing 767 set off alarms in the control tower after it got within a vertical distance of less than 150 metres from a Virgin Boeing 737 which had taken off the minute before.

The predicted failure of governments to invest in future air traffic management (ATM) systems will condemn European and American skies to inefficient operation and increased greenhouse gas emissions. That was the verdict of industry leaders at the ATC Global Exhibition and Conference held in Amsterdam in March.
Fiscal belt-tightening combined with a lull in traffic growth have removed the sense of urgency that was, a couple of years ago, associated with the drive to implement Europe's Single European Sky ATM Research (SESAR) programme. Upon SESAR's implementation depends the entire Single European Sky project and the radically changed systems required to drive future ATM advance. The managing director of Aviation Advocacy, Andrew Charlton, makes a challenging allegation: that systems for change such as SESAR and America's NextGen are "stuck on a roundabout", unable to get off.
RADICAL CHANGE

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