Legal and technical atm common solutions improve air navigation markets

The increased pressure on air traffic management has exposed some of the weaknesses of its organization. While the 1944 Chicago Convention, giving states the responsibility for providing air navigation services, remains the basis for the current industry organization, it has also led to fragmentation of systems and services which stands in marked contrast to the requirements of the aviation industry to operate across borders in a seamless manner. There have been many obstacles -technical, operational and economic -that have impeded progress but by far the largest obstacle has been an obsessive concern for national sovereignly on the part of European states involved. This nationalistic attitude has presented a double difficulty: it has frustrated attempts to design an airspace system matched to the characteristics of the air traffic to be handled rather than to national boundaries of individual countries; and it has weakened the capacity of the putative European Air Traffic Control authority, EUROCONTROL, to contribute to the solution of the inexorably increasing capacity problems of European Air Traffic Management (ATM).