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 October 2007 | “Heavenly blocks” bring order to the skies
Everyone knows the colourful Danish building blocks that young and old alike use to make diggers, houses, cars and planes. Well European air space is organised according to a similar building block principle. The ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organisation) decided to use this principle when structuring air space. There are seven classes of airspace that make up the main building blocks in the skies.
These range from “fully controlled” (airspace class A with approach ban for amateur pilots) to “uncontrolled airspace” (class G). In Germany only classes C to G are currently employed. However the German Air Traffic Control (DFS) has come up with some additional custom-made heavenly blocks. As with other European air traffic control authorities Germany has its own specific national rules. To try and tackle this “colourful” problem, the European Commission recently invited all 38 ECAC (European Civil Aviation Conference) countries to an airspace classification workshop in Brussels. Alongside EU member states countries such as Norway, Switzerland and the Ukraine also belong to the ECAC.
Present were also three representatives of airspace users, namely the spokesperson of the European Cockpit Association, the chairman of the European Association of Amateur Pilots and Hubert Gering of Eurowings as a representative of commercial aviation. As spokesperson of the most important customer group Hubert Gering requested the abolition of special rules from country to country, with some success: instead of the more than 20 special regimes, in the future there will be fewer standard blocks that will be valid throughout Europe.
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