Volcanic ash cloud exposes EU's lack of coordination

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BRUSSELS, Apr 20 (AFP): The worldwide travel chaos inflicted by a volcano in Iceland has highlighted the European Union's (EU) inability to get a coordinated aviation system off the ground, leaving travellers and airlines frustrated.
Today the EU is composed of 27 separate airspaces and "the decision to close or reopen it lies only with national governments," as a European Commission official said.
There are clear historic reasons, linked with national defence. Few governments want someone else to tell them when to shut down their airports.
Even Eurocontrol, the intergovernmental organisation for air security and navigation, which boasts 38 member nations across the continent, must content itself with attempting to coordinate national decisions rather than oversee them.
As for the European Commission, the EU's executive arm, no matter how much say it has on what happens on the ground it has very little say on what goes on above it.
IATA, the International Air Transport Association, summed it up succinctly on Monday as a "European embarrassment and... a European mess".
IATA director-general Giovanni Bisignani bemoaned the fact that "it took five days to organise a conference call with the ministers of transport," after flights were first cancelled last Thursday.
The accusation of tardiness is becoming increasingly familiar in Brussels, after similar charges in the wake of both man-made and natural disasters, such as the Greek economic crisis and the Haiti earthquake.
It's a perennial problem for the European project; how can you have a pilot at the helm if everyone on board wants their own steering wheel?
An estimated one million air passengers remained stuck on the ground due to the ash cloud spewing from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland.
There was some good news for them Tuesday as European governments opened the continent's airspace to some flights following the five-day lockdown.
EU transport ministers, able to hold talks only by videoconference Monday, agreed there would be a shifting no-fly zone where the experts found high concentrations of the volcanic ash.
But as soon as they announced that decision, British air traffic chiefs warned that the volcano had spewed a fresh cloud of ash, hitting hopes of a return to business as usual by Thursday.
The EU commission's director general for transport, Matthias Ruete, is backing the calls for a more coordinated response from Europe.
"Let's finally get the 'single sky' idea working," he said. That plan to have a European system rather than the aerial patchwork of 27 national administrators has been in the air for years but remains grounded due to governments' fears of a loss of sovereignty.