![]() ![]() The sole air traffic controller on duty in Zurich at the time of the accident was struggling to keep a watch on five planes on two radar screens. German investigators have made public their alarming reconstruction of the moments just before last week's crash, increasing the pressure on the Swiss air authorities to explain the apparent blunders which led to the collision. Britain's national air traffic services is suffering a similar shortage, a spokesman said. About a tenth of the vacancies in Germany. The report, published in yesterday's Bild am Sonntag, described the German skies as "busier than the motorways".Īn acute shortage of air traffic controllers in Europe is exacerbating the problem, ac cording to Marc Baumgartner, president of the umbrella organisation for the world's air traffic controllers, Ifatca, who said: "In some countries, such as Spain and Italy, air safety is only guaranteed if air traffic controllers work overtime."Įurope-wide there is a shortage of about 2,000 controllers. They included a British Airways plane approaching Munich airport which avoided collision with a small aircraft by 30 metres by making an emergency landing. The panel from the transport ministry, the civil aviation authority, the air force and the national aviation accident investigation committee said that 10 of the cases were classified as acute. A leaked report from German aviation experts revealed that there were 74 near-misses - known as "airprox" - over Germany last year. The announcement came as worrying details emerged of the chaos in the skies over Europe. "We are particularly concentrating on reducing traffic in the periods where there is a high concentration of around 40 planes an hour." "They are used to stress in their work, but this is another kind of stress," Philipp Seiler, a spokesman at Zurich Kloten airport, said. ![]()
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