Tracking planes is a costly business. In Spain, air-traffic controllers earn more than €200,000 a year on average
, the industrial estate near Maastricht’s out-of-the-way airport, hardly appears the future of civil aviation. But it houses the Maastricht Upper Area Control Centre , where up to 100 air-traffic controllers work at a time to ensure that planes flying high above Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and north-western Germany do not bump into each other.
This is just what controlling air traffic is intended to avoid. The current system developed in the 1950s after a series of deadly mid-air collisions. In 1956 two aircraft collided over the Grand Canyon, killing all 128 on board. Soon after, in 1958, America gave thethe power to manage air traffic over its territory. Other countries soon set up their own air-traffic-control systems.
, an airline-trade body based in Brussels. The extra capacity they produce will be gobbled up by rising demand for air travel. And the longer flights the plans entail will waste even more fuel.is changing tack, releasing a report in April calling for the creation of a “Digital European Sky”. Instead of merging each country’s air-traffic manager, the focus is on cutting costs by, for example, setting a common standard for digitisation to ensure each country invests in compatible systems.
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