When Arndt Schoenemann talks about weekends, it’s not about relaxing in the summer, but about “extreme peaks” in the work of air traffic controllers. Schoenemann is the head of the German air traffic control (DFS) in Langen near Frankfurt, which regulates traffic in the sky over the Federal Republic. And the DFS controllers have been seeing for weeks that there is a lot going on at weekends in particular – because holiday traffic has approached the pre-crisis level, while there are fewer business trips. The coming weekend is considered a special challenge. Then the school holidays will also begin in Hesse, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland. Germany’s largest airport in Frankfurt is expecting the busiest day in almost three years.
More than 200,000 passengers are expected to take off or land between 5 a.m. and 11 p.m. Even if the airport operator Fraport reduced the number of take-offs and landings per hour in two steps from 106 to 88 in the fight against bottlenecks, queues and baggage chaos, there are still a little more than 1200 flights a day to and from Frankfurt for which the controllers of the DFS need to take care of. In the first half of the year, they accompanied a total of more than 1.2 million flights, which was 76 percent of the level in 2019, reports Schoenemann. For the year as a whole, he expects 85 percent.
But sometimes you are already higher. In the DFS control center in Karlsruhe, which monitors the airspace over southern Germany, 20 percent more flights were counted this June than in June 2019. Schoenemann speaks of a “rapid increase in traffic”. Airports and airlines attribute this in their business to the great desire to take vacations after two years of Corona, while there is still a lack of staff despite the fact that new hires have started. Schoenemann sees other triggers that allow the work of his pilots to grow. Since Russia has been at war in Ukraine, parts of Eastern Europe can no longer be flown over, and airlines are diverting widely. “There is hardly any air traffic east of Warsaw,” he says. The French air traffic control has meanwhile exchanged software in its headquarters, for a transitional period controllers can monitor fewer flights there, and airlines are evading again. As a result, more traffic is coming from East and West into the area of responsibility of DFS. “There is an extreme concentration in air traffic,” says Schoenemann.
“We are not the driver”
In addition, there are military overflights, of which there are up to 60 percent more in the current crisis period. For these overflights, one of four flight corridors always has to be closed at short notice, the controllers have to divert holiday jets and other passenger flights or force them to a lower or higher altitude. You often only have 30 minutes to prepare. According to Schoenemann, some corridors cannot be used for civil flights for up to five hours a day.
