The Origins. The idea of a single sky for Europe is one of long-standing. Indeed, EUROCONTROL was created in 1960 for the express purpose of creating a single upper airspace by its six founding member states. This purpose was only partially fulfilled at the time – but the idea remained a tenacious one.
The growth of traffic is yet to continue. EUROCONTROL expects that today’s traffic will have doubled by 2020. Current systems, with ongoing improvements, should be able to handle this increased load until the middle of the next decade. After that, more radical measures are called for in order to avoid serious congestion.
The Single European Sky (SES) initiative is confidently expected to lay the foundations of a unified system which will be able to cater for the anticipated growth.
A Single Market, A Single Currency, A Single Sky? Europe eliminated frontiers on the ground with the 1985 single European market. It dismantled economic frontiers with the 1990 economic and monetary union. It is a view widely held that borders in the sky should not exist.
In spite of much effort to modernize and streamline it, Europe’s air traffic management system remains safe but fair costly. It is also hampered by heterogeneous working practices and constrained by air route networks which, in the main, are based on national borders and not air traffic flows.
The Single European Sky initiative puts forward a legislative approach to solving the issues that currently affect air transport as well as enabling ATM to cope with future demands.