• Airspace matters
• Re: Airspace matters
• Airspace matters - A Call for Action

At the time of the accident the weather conditions were VMC, with a
visibility of more than 8 Km.

The F-16 was part of a formation of 3 aircraft, flying low level at a speeds between 450 and 480 Kts.

The Royal Dutch air force has a general waiver for the maximum speed of 250 Kts below 10.000 ft / FL100 when the visibility is at least 8 Km.

The RvTV (the Dutch NTSB) has published the final accident report on their web site:

http://www.rvtv.nl/activiteiten/luchtvaart/index.html

The final report is in Dutch language and can be downloaded as a Adobe PDF file via:

http://www.rvtv.nl/data/988192111.pdf

One of their recommendations is the establishment of special military operation corridors to separate high speed low level military traffic from slower civil traffic.

OK, sounds like a good recommendation ! Doesn't it ?? Now look at the size of our little wet country, filled with windmills and people wearing wooden shoes. Also have a look at the airspace that's available to the slower civil traffic, like gliders.

http://home.soneraplaza.nl/mw/prive/hwl/airspace

The western part of the country is already filled with a very large TMA for Amsterdam Schiphol airport, starting as class A at 1500 ft and making this part of the country unsoarable. The rest of the country is filled with several class C military and civil CTR's and a class E TMA up to FL065 (FL095 in weekend). We (glider pilots) are happy that we can fly up to FL065 in the little class E airspace that is left.

Now they are thinking about taking away a large chunk of that airspace from us to.

If the Dutch glider pilots don't speak up now, we will end up in the same or even worse situation as in Belgium.

This whole situation is one of the largest threats to the world wide soaring community and fighting for our air space rights should have priority number one by all NAC's and FAI IGC.

Ruud Holswilder.
(B747-400 / Ventus-2cT)

I fully share your concern. Airspace is a necessary resource for gliding. Not only in your country, but all over Europe do we see the same problems. Europe is facing a general re-organisation of airspace that may lead to even bigger problems for us, as Class E airspace is likely to disappear. In the worst case, gliding will become an air sport limited to boxes around the airfields.

Two European organisations, Europe Air Sports and European Gliding Union are fighting against this through Eurocontrol. Whether we succeed, only time will show. It is important that also on a national level the authorities are bombarded with arguments securing adequate airspace to VFR flying, this is a task for the national aero clubs.

Peter Eriksen
President, European Gliding Union
Phone, home: +33 1 6990 2930
Phone, office: +33 1 6988 7209
Fax, office: +33 1 6988 7352
Address: 57 rue de Cheval'Rue, F-91820 Boutigny-sur-Essonne

Airspace matters - A Call for Action

I fully agree with the severe airspace threat assessment above. We have lamented this development for a long time now. Airspace is getting an increasingly scarce commodity, more and more expropriated by potent commercial interests. The military, in a sense, are in the same "defensive situation" of gliding, but their defensive capability has the advantage of being based on "national interest", with high level government and parliamentary access.

I believe that for the gliding community the main solutiont is to hire a really good specialized lawyer firm and start seriously lobbying for our airspace on an European Union perspective, adding national efforts where needed. This is costly, far too costly on an individual basis, but perfectly affordable for us as a community. If, for instance, we would devote a small percentage of our personal yearly gliding budget to airspace lobbying (say, 3-5%), it would achieve, in my opinion, very substantial results towards stopping the "airspace erosion" that we are suffering. There are quite a few legal remedies in the convoluted European body of legislation to establish roadblocks to this kind of gradual airspace expropriation, but WE MUST ACT, and fast.

The main difficulty, once a consensus may be reached to take legal/lobbying action, is to collect the money. Unfortunately, there will be always a certain number of freeloaders (people who do not contribute, and riding for free on the efforts of the others - a good booklet explains this very well, "The Logic of Collective Action", by Mancur Olson, a political scientist - recommended!) - but this is NOT reason enough to refrain from action...

We could proceed as follows (consider it only "food for thought", but if you like it, then please push to DO something!):

EGU would be the promoting entity, which means:

• it decides what to do through its deliberating bodies (e-mail or an extraordinary meeting?),
• it contacts one or more lobbying firms (I believe I can help with this, these are mostly based in Brussels),
• it prepares a financial budget, both expenses and income
• it designs and launches a "Save our airspace" campaign - posters, ads, etc. (Advertising companies working for WWF &Co have plenty of such ready-to-launch campaigns available)
• it collects income in form of voluntary contributions - for instance: (a) a special (thin!) adhesive label to be affixed to every glider tail in Europe, which states that the glider owner (club or person) has voluntarily contributed to this airspace saving effort - possibly in more colors & denominations (say, "standard" for 20 Euros, "premium" for 100 Euros, and (b) lapel pins for individuals, again in different forms and values (could we also design an attachment to existing FAI badge pins?)

Whether EGU would also be the acting entity, or rather Europe Airsports or FAI, should then be decided on a basis of effectiveness as advised by our legal specialists.

How does it all sound? Can we finally DO something about our airspace erosion?

Alvaro de Orleans-Borbon