Operating resilience of the UK's aviation infrastructure

The UK’s airport and airspace capacity is constrained, and there will be no new significant airport runway capacity until 2025. Our busiest airports are regularly among the worst performing in Europe in terms of on-time performance. Although passengers benefit from increases in capacity, such as those which arise from higher runway utilisation, they also suffer if that leads to more delays and worse reliability.

The purpose of this consultation was for the CAA to explore two key areas from a UK perspective, recognising that the issues are likely to be more severe in the South East of England:

• How can the performance of the aviation network be improved or optimised?
• How effective is the current regime and how are consumer interests represented?

We had 23 formal responses to the consultation, which we have published where we have permission to do so. Submitted responses where consent has been given to publish the response can be viewed at the bottom of this page.

In general, repsonses to the request for information were based on opinion or experience rather than evidence. The main points can be summarised as follows:

• Agreement that the current capacity declaration process works well at Heathrow, where various parties are aligned in improving performance as opposed to being able to increase flights (8 responses)
• Capacity/airspace decisions should take account of more information from more/all airports (7 responses)
• The need for UK airspace modernisation and improvements in Europe (7 responses)
• Mixed views about the declaration process at Gatwick (5 positive responses Vs 5 negative)
• Call for the effect on residents to be taking into account (3 responses)
• Ground-handler market is not working - they are under-resourced (2 responses)
• Mixed views on greater transparency of information (some agreed in principle, some that issues are too complex for consumers to find useful)
• Other themes around airports' market power, incumbent airlines' incentives to protect their interests, and the use of regional and GA airports.

Some of the issues raised in response to this consultation are being addressed by other areas of our work, or are down to purely commercial decisions, such as the distribution of commercial and general aviation traffic at airports.

However, we also believe that further investigation is merited into planning, scheduling and operational processes and that there are opportunities for consistency and better cross-industry collaboration.

There are currently no collective rights and responsibilities concerning resilience in the aviation system, potentially leading to inefficient outcomes for industry and consumers. Indeed, there are many complexities, such that it may be difficult for a single entity to guarantee improvements to its own operation, even where it chooses to spend more money on resilience.

The CAA believes that in the period up to and following the provision of new runway capacity in the South East, action needs to be taken to mitigate the risks to consumers arising from a lack of resilience which we have highlighted in this report. 

Given resilience problems are likely to require collective cross-industry action to resolve, in early 2017, the CAA decided to test industry appetite for forming a voluntary group to consider how best to tackle these issues. In April 2017 a group of airports and airlines based in the congested South East of the UK, along with NATS, ACL and the CAA formed the Voluntary Industry Resilience Group (VIRG) to pool their expertise and recommend actions (for industry itself or the Government, as part of its review of Aviation Strategy) to address current and future resilience issues. 

Notwithstanding the recommendations of the VIRG, there are still opportunities for the CAA to consider or formalise resilience issues through the appropriate airport economic licence process.  However, CAA regulation may not be the most appropriate mechanism, as for airports it only applies currently at Heathrow and Gatwick, and we can only introduce licence conditions at airports where we have deemed that they have sufficient market power to require a licence. 

The CAA could also consider NERL licence conditions to cover traffic prioritisation, airspace change, airport schedule oversight and staffing level resilience. Any such changes must be implemented through the appropriate licence process involving consultation with NERL and its stakeholders, and considered in the context of relevant European wide airspace targets.

Government intervention would take time, and there is an opportunity as a likely new aviation strategy and legal arrangements for a new runway are developed.  The CAA believes that the Government should consider options for structural reform as it develops its aviation strategy. In particular what beneficial changes (if any) could be made to the airport capacity declaration responsibilities (or oversight) or to the UK slot legislation, and the potential benefits of a network system manager who could plan, co-ordinate and make decisions to improve resilience.

The CAA also intends to review its information duties and punctuality statistics reporting during 2017 and could take the opportunity to introduce new or modified measures that better capture resilience or the factors which affect it.