Defragmentation of the skies

This short text serves as an introduction to this special issue of Competition and Regulation in Network Industries, with its special focus on the defragmentation of the European airspace. The context of this special issue is the question of how current nationally organized air traffic management (ATM) will cope with air traffic growth. While this is a problem in the airspace of many countries worldwide—notably in countries with rapid growth, such as the United States, China, and India—it is in Europe where the problem appears to be most acute. This is due to a combination of two trends. On one hand, air traffic in Europe is growing particularly rapidly, with a 34% increase in air passenger numbers over the past 5 years. On the other hand, the European airspace is especially fragmented, given that airspace is nationally managed by socalled air navigation service providers (ANSPs), most of which are optimizing their own airspace by segmenting it. In response, in 1999, the European Commission (EC) launched the so-called Single European Sky (SES) initiative, aimed at reducing delays, increasing safety, mitigating the environmental impact, and reducing costs related to service provision in the aviation sector. The EC has sought to achieve this by promoting the defragmentation of the European airspace and by creating a more efficient ATM system. Although the policy is evolving and new features such as functional airspace blocks (FABs) and a technological pillar, SESAR (Single European Sky ATM Research), have been added to the original concept, the SES has failed to deliver the expected progress. As a result, the European airspace remains fragmented and capacity problems increase parallel to rapidly growing air traffic. This special issue of CRNI addresses selected aspects of the fragmented European airspace, as well as means and ways to defragment it from an academic perspective: