in Europe longest routes for 300 flights a day – Corriere.it

The largest NATO air exercise since its foundation (1949) is on its third day in the skies of central Europe and the Baltic and is being monitored not only by insiders, but also by airlines who find themselves having to change the route of about 800 flights every day, lengthening the journey times of 300 of these. For now, there have been no inconveniences for passengers, but the real test will take place on Friday the 16th, the peak day for connections when thousands of people will go to the holiday resorts.

The operations

“Air Defender 2023” kicked off on Monday 12 June: the maneuvers – which mainly concern Germany’s airspace – will end on 23 June, will stop on the weekend of 17 and 18 June, with the participation of 25 member countries of the Atlantic Alliance and its partners who have mobilized 10,000 troops and 250 aircraft. The purpose of the initiative is “to optimize and expand cooperation between participating States” and simulates the activation of article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, i.e. collective defense in the event of an attack against a member country.

The areas

The maneuvers will take place in particular in the German skies, in the Czech Republic, in the Baltic States, in Poland and in Romania and this will involve the closure of part of the airspace to civilian aircraft and drones for a few hours. A document from Eurocontrol – the European agency which supervises the Old Continent – recalls that restrictions on commercial activities are envisaged in three macro-blocks: in the “Eastern” one (which corresponds to the north-east of Germany) between 10 and 14 Italian time, in the «South» (south-west of Germany) between 13 and 17, and in the «North» (north-west of Germany) between 16 and 20.

The ratings

“Around 800 commercial flights a day will have to take a different route,” estimates Eurocontrol in the same document. And he adds that of these “300 connections the distance will be lengthened by 110 kilometres, on average, something like 7 more minutes of travel”. In general, in its worst-case scenario, the European agency expects an average delay during the route between 150 and 180 seconds. On the first day of exercises, according to the Eurocontrol database, there were 32,124 flights in Europe with an average delay of 5 minutes, mostly caused by bad weather.

The reactions

The airlines, which come from years of maxi-losses due to Covid and from a summer – the past one – full of inconveniences, underline that the exercise is sacrosanct, even if it could create a few too many problems for their operations. “Not even German air traffic controllers know the real impact of these exercises because they have never been held in such a large way,” said Carsten Spohr, CEO of the Lufthansa group, during a meeting with some foreign journalists – among those the Courier — on the sidelines of the Iata work in Istanbul. “We have prepared ourselves in the best possible way, the airports are giving us a hand”. “But I want to underline it: this is for a good cause, we have to make sure that Europe can defend itself from external dangers”.

The reparations

When asked about the consequences to flights Willie Walsh, director general of Iata (the international association of carriers, ed), says al Courier that “there will certainly be delays” also because the airspace has narrowed due to the closure of the Ukrainian skies after the invasion of Ukraine. But he questions the European rules on passenger compensation — Law 261 —: “Why must companies compensate travelers for delays, as in this case, which could be attributable to NATO exercises? I don’t think it’s right.”