Aviation
Airlines Squabble Cost Region $M
Flight information services split into four
A quarrel over sharing the fees that international airlines pay for flying through the airspace of Pacific Islands countries has stalled a plan for what would be the world¹s largest and most efficient air traffic control region.
However, Pacific Islands aviation ministers, at a September meeting in Samoa, gave a greenlight for more work to allow regional airlines to operate pretty much as they like in a deregulated Pacific Islands commercial aviation market.
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Fiji had hoped to have the Pacific's flight information services merged to be centred on Nadi Airport. The Pacific¹s flight information services are currently split into regions controlled by centres in New Zealand, Australia, Fiji, the United States and the French territories of New Caledonia and French Polynesia. Instead, Fiji will lose about F$3 million (US$1.3 million) in fees paid for flights through the airspace of Tonga and Samoa, which want the management of their regions transferred to New Zealand.
The New Zealanders, who began efforts to poach the Tongan and Samoa regions from Nadi Airport¹s air navigation service five years ago, offered the Tongans and Samoans a share of the revenue.
Over the years Fiji has hogged the lot. It isn¹t commercially feasible for smaller islands countries to run their own centres.
According to a study by the Asian Development Bank, a jointly owned air traffic control company could by the year 2012 be making at least US$20 million a year in air navigation fees for about 10 island country shareholders.
The company would have been located at Nadi Airport, whose present flight information region covering half a dozen countries, would have doubled in size.
The Asian Development Bank report said that air sovereignty was "fast becoming an issue". It warned that the fragmentation of air traffic control in the Pacific Islands region would become a financial disaster.
By going it alone smaller countries could not profitably operate the complex new satellite navigation and communications systems being adopted now by major airlines as world standard.
The report said there is no sensible reason for having more than one advanced air traffic control for the region and that Nadi was the obvious location.
The transition by world airlines to the new satellite systems (known technically as Communications, Navigation and Surveillance/Air Traffic Management (CNS/ATM) systems) plus hints of the beginning of fragmentation of control made the implementation of a regional airspace management plan "urgent and essential," the report said The Asian Development Bank offered a loan of about US$20 million needed to get the joint company started. Air navigation services such as weather and other information would be applied to long distance jets and regional flights operating above a height of about 3000 metres and normally flying at 10,000 metres or more.
The flop of the Asian Development Bank scheme is buried in a statement issued after a meeting of Pacific Islands aviation ministers held in Samoa in September.
The meeting said the Asian Development Bank plan "did not sufficiently address all the issues of concern" and that it was "important" that islands countries ³make their own decisions concerning the management of their air space."
Because of the delay in dealing with the Asian Development Bank scheme "opportunity previously available to utilise new technologies in conjunction with the proposal had passed", the ministers said.
They put the scheme on ice indefinitely, perhaps to be revived at "some future time."
Deregulation of regional air services would entail the replacement of more than 60 bilateral (country-to-country) air service agreements by a multilateral (single) agreement.
According to the Forum Secretariat, this would let airlines fly within the region as and when they like. Airlines would become more efficient, competitive, be encouraged to open new routes and be better placed to develop tourism, the secretariat says. The ministerial meeting received a draft for a Pacific Islands Air Services Agreement (PIASA), details of which now need to be negotiated between islands countries.
The new agreement would initially apply only to regional services, but would eventually need to cover flights to Australia and New Zealand. In other moves, the aviation ministers backed a plan for the opening of a Pacific aviation safety office (PASO) for the supervision of common aviation engineering and operating rules.
They asked the Forum Secretariat and Forum Fisheries Agency to work on improving air cargo services for the export of fresh fish, now one of the region¹s fastest growing industries.
