NEWS FLASH
The Serbia and Montenegro Air Traffic Services Agency (SMATSA) has registered its busiest 24 hours on record over the previous weekend. On Saturday, July 13, it handled a total of 4.095 flights through its airspace. SMATSA noted that over the past week, Belgrade Air Traffic Control Centre was among the top ten busiest air traffic control centres in Europe based on the number of flights handled. SMATSA set its previous record just three weeks ago, on June 29, when it handled 3.903 flights.
Wow
ReplyDeleteThere is a crazy number of flights to Turkey (Greece and Egypt too) for summer holidays, most of them flying over Serbia
ReplyDeleteWhat is maximum capacity SMATSA is capable of handling for 24 hours?
ReplyDeleteI read somewhere that SMATSA can serve 4500 planes in 24 hours
DeleteGood for them but ATC delays are becoming a huge problem in Europe. Many, many airports in the West are experiencing serious issues this summer. A friend of mine flew on KLM recently from France to AMS and they were sitting in the plane for 45 minutes waiting for their ATC slot.
ReplyDeleteCan confirm, I spent 35 mins on the tarmac yesterday flying CDG-LHR waiting for the ATC slot. In the end we spent more time on the tarmac than in-flight.
DeleteNot only CDG and AMS, we were flying W5 from BEG to AUH and due to a missing passenger that had to be offloaded, we missed our departure slot. We sat at BEG for 40 minutes before being cleared for pushback. Cpt was at least polite and kept us informed of the events unfolding and the resulting delay...
DeleteSame here flew BEG-BUD the other day, 1 hour delay due to ATC restrictions.
DeleteWhen talking about ATC delays, it’s mostly “terminal” and aerodrome ATC,, that is, ATC at and around major aerodromes that get saturated, occasionally enroute sectors in “core” Europe (Maastricht, Karlsrhue, Paris, Swiss airspace). Also, even for aerodrome ATC the key limiting factor is often the aerodrome layout that represents the bottle neck, rather than the ATC system itself (e.g. in Zurich). Elsewhere, enroute sectors in Europe get restricted almost exclusively due to technical, weather or staffing issues. Beograd ACC (enroute airspace), while increasingly busy, is not struggling with capacity, and has quite some margin left (unlike those in so called “core” Europe).
ReplyDeleteTHe issue in aviation around the world is that every village wants to fly to another village, leading to a glut of flight because of all these small aircraft movements, if flights were restricted to larger city to city corridors the issue would be less congestion
ReplyDelete