2023-06-21 05:57:36
According to the Air Transport Action Group (ATAG), there are on average more than 100,000 flights per day across the planet. In high season, the figure can even be doubled. A nice total visible on the FlightRadar24 site, where it is possible to track any aircraft in the world. And so, by extension, to see the ceaseless ballet of planes in the sky, when Europe looks more like the Autoroute du Soleil on the first weekend of July and North America at the Chatelet station on time peak. Judge for yourself this monstrosity:
A lot of planes right now, right? – FlightRadar24 – Screenshot
As numerous as his flights may seem, it’s still nothing compared to what awaits us. While the Paris Air Show has just opened its doors, the two airline giants, Boeing and AirBus, estimate that the world fleet should double within twenty years, and reach 48,575 aircraft in service in 2042, against 24,500 last year. . Count soon twice as many flights – and planes – on the map within two decades.
But to see it already so full, one wonders if there is not a limit – physical – to all that? Traffic jams on the highway are certainly painful, but it passes. But having to brake over the Atlantic Ocean for an airplane already seems a bit more complex. What if our skies end up being saturated?
Another hell of a margin
So let’s forget, for the time of this article, all ecological questions or economic profitability – sorry Greta. In pure physical capacity, “if there is a limit to the number of planes, we are very far from it”, notes Hubert Arnould, director of Iaco, a consulting firm specializing in regulatory compliance for aviation safety. The sky is certainly not totally infinite, but still: it is not with 45,000 planes and 400,000 supposed flights per day that we will fill it. Even with a million flights, “we would still be very far from a saturated and congested sky. You sometimes see a plane pass in the sky. Sometimes two. Come on three, let’s go crazy. But rarely 40 at the same time.
In addition to the size of the sky, the regulatory distance between two planes in full flight is not that great. Vertically, two cars can “graze” as long as they are more than 1,000 feet from each other, barely 300 meters. For the horizontal distance, it is necessary to count, for two planes flying in cruise at the same altitude, 5,000 nautical miles, or a little less than 10 kilometers. Finally very little in the immensity of the clouds. Proof of this is that collisions between two airliners are (fortunately) extremely rare: only one in the 21st century, the Überlingen accident in 2002.
Maximization of air corridors and end of hubs
The sky is big, fine, but as we can see in the photo, some spaces are still more saturated than others. Iza Bazin, pilot and aeronautical expert, nevertheless notes “that aircraft tracking can become even more precise and precise, in order to best maximize the most popular air corridors. For example, make sure that the slowest planes fly at the end of the ”platoon”, so as not to slow everyone down. Ditto for safety distances: “in particularly saturated areas, such as London and New York, there are exceptions and planes have the right to stick together even more, there too to maximize traffic. » These are the RVSM (Reduced Vertical Separation Minima, or Reduced vertical separation minimum in French). Xavier Tytelman, expert in aeronautical questions, explains: “Instead of having 1,000 feet of spacing in height, one could think of reducing to 800 or even 500 feet”.
Especially since the trend is rather towards the desaturation of certain large lines, explains Hubert Arnould, due to the end of hubs. Back to New York. Before, to go there, a Frenchman necessarily left Paris. From now on, there is a direct air route from Nice, one in Brussels or Frankfurt for our friends in the East or in the North of France, one in Barcelona for those in the South, and, once upon a time, one in Lyon. In short, air links are multiplying, in particular due to greater autonomy of aircraft, “which allows to go from further away”.
Xavier Tytelman continues: “Most of the new planes will cover new routes and areas that are not yet very popular, such as Africa or Central America”.
Ground braking
The famous proverb “sky is the limit” would therefore be completely wrong. Because the real obstacle is the ground. “For now, airports are much more saturated than the sky,” explains Hubert Arnould. Iza Bazin takes the painful example of September 11 when, after the terrorist attacks, planes were ordered to land in the United States. Problem: a huge lack of space in airports.
“There are a lot of enlargement works, for example at London Heathrow”, notes Hubert Arnould. The British airport, in the top 10 of the busiest in the world, had in 2019 – the last pre-pandemic year – four of the most profitable routes in the world, according to the English firm OAG, a specialist in air transport studies. A feat when you know that the airport has only two runways, against four for example for Charles-de-Gaulle. Work has been validated for the construction of a third, which should increase the number of annual passengers from 80 to 130 million. Airports are getting bigger, and planes too: “The idea is that an air link that required, for example, 10 departures from Amsterdam will only require eight in the future, thanks to more passengers per flight” , continues Xavier Tytelman.
Airports not so cumbersome
To these expansions are added the creation of new airports, such as that of Istanbul (İstanbul Havalimani), inaugurated in 2018, and which aspired to become the largest in the world. If the potential is certainly less infinite than in the sky, “there is still room to build or expand many airports”, argues Iza Bazin. She takes New York as an example, again, which manages to have no less than three “huge international airports within 45 minutes of Manhattan”.
So of course, “the goal is not to see airports grow everywhere, but we are still far from having reached the limit”, concludes the specialist. The maximum number of planes to permanently block the sky will therefore remain a mystery for a little while.
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