The European Coordination of Air Traffic Controllers Associations (ATCEUC) and the Cyprus Air Traffic Controllers Association (CYATCU) have called for urgent international and European high-level action to address long-standing flight safety risks in the Nicosia FIR, following a near-collision incident between a Turkish military aircraft and a civil passenger aircraft.
In separate letters sent on Thursday, the two organisations warned that, 14 years after the European Commission described the situation in the Nicosia FIR as "unsustainable and unacceptable from the point of view of flight safety", no effective technical solution has been implemented.
The new appeals follow an incident that occurred on the night of August 19 and involved a Turkish Air Force Airbus A400M transport aircraft and a Boeing 737-800 TUI Airways aircraft in the Nicosia FIR.
As reported by ATCEUC, the Turkish military aircraft, with a call sign TUAF770, entered the Nicosia FIR without restoring communication and followed a course different from that provided for in its declared flight plan. The aircraft was ascending to flight level FL360 in the northern part of the Nicosia FIR, close to the boundaries with the Ankara FIR, while the civilian aircraft, with flight number TOM56T, was descending via FL350 on a convergent course.
According to ATCEUC, a serious incident was avoided after air traffic controllers at the Nicosia Area Control Centre (ACC) detected the collision of the courses and instructed the civilian aircraft to stop its descent.
The European federation said the incident demonstrates that the long-standing problem in the Nicosia FIR has not been resolved and that military aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles operating from Turkey continue to operate without effective coordination near critical air routes and at Larnaca and Paphos airports.
In its letter, CYATCU warned that safety risks can no longer be left to the vigilance of individual air traffic controllers.
The guild said the August 19 incident was not isolated, but "a visible moment in a pattern" that its members have been experiencing for years. According to CYATCU, its members at ACC Nicosia face unauthorized flights of Turkish military aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles in the Nicosia FIR on a daily basis, with no flight plans filed in Nicosia and no two-way communication.
Controllers, he said, are called upon to monitor, predict and compensate for the movements of aircraft whose flights are not coordinated with Nicosia, while at the same time managing civil air traffic to and from Larnaca and Paphos airports.
"The reason why the Nicosia FIR has not recorded a fatal accident to date, despite this behavior, is not that the risk is managed by any institution represented in this correspondence. It is because our members, for decades, have personally absorbed a risk that rightfully belongs to international enforcement," CYATCU said.
The union warned that the vigilance of controllers cannot be considered a permanent guarantee against a serious accident, particularly as unmanned aerial vehicle activity adds another unpredictable element to an already complex operational environment.
The interventions come 14 years after the European Commission expressed concern about dangerous incidents in the Nicosia FIR. In a letter to ATCEUC in March 2012, the Commission expressed "deep concern" about the reported increase in incidents and acknowledged the serious threat they posed to aviation safety, noting that it was working with the parties involved to find a satisfactory technical solution.
However, ATCEUC said that since then no technical solution has been announced, made public or effectively implemented, and direct communication and coordination between the air traffic control centers of Ankara and Nicosia has not been restored.
The European federation calls for the direct involvement of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a review of the absence of two-way coordination between Ankara and Nicosia, as well as a new high-level diplomatic initiative by the European Union, with the participation of the European Commission, Cyprus and Turkey.
It also calls for a joint safety assessment by the European Commission and EUROCONTROL, with the conclusions to be made public, as well as a clear and time-bound roadmap to restore effective operational coordination.
CYATCU supported these requests and requested that air traffic controllers at ACC Nicosia be directly involved in any safety assessment or fact-finding process.
At the same time, he stressed that any solution should not burden Cyprus through measures that will limit the civil air traffic or connectivity of the island, noting that Cyprus should not bear the economic or operational consequences of a problem that it did not create.
ATCEUC President Jean-Denis Larrère said the goal remains to ensure that the skies over the Eastern Mediterranean are safe, predictable and governed by effective international cooperation and regulations.
"The time has come to turn the 2012 commitments into a viable technical solution," he said.
CNA
