An Upgrade in Maastricht

The cargo cult

Maastricht may be a household word, but in aviation terms it does not yet rival O’Hare, or Heathrow. Ten years ago, Maastricht Airport looked as if it were about to hit the big time as a cargo hub. However, major operators like Emery moved on, when it became clear that local political pressure groups would stop construction of a new east-west runway.

The new runway was badly needed to get wide-bodied jets into the air with a full load of fuel. It was even whispered, at the time, that fuelling stops were being paid for by local agencies to keep the cargo business in Maastricht. This was not to be, however, despite the recent growth in daytime cargoes. The pressure group turned out to be much better versed in the legal procedures, or perhaps just more dedicated, than their political adversaries.

In the Netherlands, there is also a tendency in cargo logistics thinking to see the whole country as a dependency of the Rotterdam/Schiphol main ports. As far as the harbour masters of Rotterdam are concerned and Schiphol’s bosses too, the idea is to shoot cargoes from the Randstad (the Amsterdam/Rotterdam conurbation) straight through to the German and Central European hinterland without even allowing the pallets to touch the sides.

Talk about tubes and tunnels is highly fashionable. Regional airports and inland dry ports, with the possible exception of Venlo, receive, to put it generously, a benign form of neglect. Express cargo operators, who might have thought of Maastricht, turned their attention to the nearby Belgian airport at Liège-Bierset. This airport was initially not licensed for civil aviation, but was officially designated a military airport.

Procedural hurdles were leapfrogged in Belgium and the authorities, while not unmoved by local residential dissent, are launching a major development plan. Now among Europe’s top 12 and one of the five-member Aéroports de Paris group, Liège Airport is flourishing. Cargo tonnage in 1999 was up to 207,629 tons and figures for 2020 are projected at 1.2 million, with 12,250 new jobs in the same period.

These projections would seem to bear out the NYFER (www.NYFER.com) report on the regional economic impact of airports in Europe. They say that one million extra passengers produces 6,700 service sector jobs and 2,600 jobs in industry. Aviation industry growth drives the move to a service-based economy

Noise, in the form of TNT’s 747s, remains a problem though. In a sense, the Maastricht story is repeating itself in Liège because a fully laden Jumbo needs an extra 400 meters of runway there too. Regional government thinks that grant-sponsored insulation, some rehousing and rezoning will solve the problem, but there is, at the time of writing, at least one hunger strike underway.

Maastricht has not simply languished, however. With a little help from Aachen, where the Chamber of Commerce took a modest NLG 50,000 stake in the airport, it has become Maastricht Aachen Airport (MAA). Now with KLM-Exel, it is rapidly developing an interesting niche market with new scheduled flights to Berlin (four times daily), Munich, Milan, etc. – a boon to the insurance industry among others.

MAA is luring lucrative German traffic from already congested airports at Düsseldorf and Cologne/Bonn. Its charter flights also include those of Germany’s travel giant, Condor und Neckermann. Despite Cologne/Bonn’s possession of a 4000-meter space-shuttle-enabled runway, it is likely to have to cut night flights and regional centres beckon.

The ATM scene in Maastricht

The MAA perimeter is now a substantial business park and adjacent to the airport is Eurocontrol Maastricht UAC. When the aviation authorities in the Benelux countries, France, Germany, Ireland and the UK decided to put civil air traffic, flying above 25,000 feet, in the hands of a single authority in the 1960’s, they were not aware of the potential growth of air traffic above that ceiling or of the speed of developments.

At that time, air traffic above 25,000 feet was made up of long haul Boeing 707s and DC8s. The rapid pace of technological development and the political climate at the time led France to withdraw first from the air traffic control agreement. The French were particularly concerned about access to information on their military air traffic. Later the UK withdrew for similar reasons.

The new plan had been to have major sector control centers at Karlsruhe, Maastricht and Shannon. However, when the UK withdrew, Ireland did too. This left the Benelux countries and Germany, with headquarters in Brussels, as the sole survivors of the plan.

Nevertheless, the system kicked off in 1973. In 1974 German airspace was added and in 1975 part of West Germany’s military traffic came into the system too. Civilian-military co-operation brought enormous benefits with a drop, by 75-80%, in the reported number of air proximities.

By the mid-90s, Belgian airspace above 20,000 feet, German airspace above 25,000 feet and Dutch above 30,000 feet was in the hands of Eurocontrol. Eventually this was standardized to 25,000 feet for all partners, making for a reasonable slice of the business.

In 1995, however, with the privatization of German air traffic control and the integration of military and civilian control, a change came into sight. First, the German air traffic control authority, BFS (Bundesflugsicherung), became the DFS (Deutsche flugsicherung), reflecting the political change after reunification.

DFS was then handling some 1.2 million flight movements, 500,000 of which fell to the sector managed by Eurocontrol Maastricht. DFS decided to centralize operations in Düsseldorf, Frankfurt and Bremen.

One big difference above Maastricht will be the Eurocontrol RVSM programme (see the full story in the September/October 2000 issue of Air Traffic Management.)

A new route structure has now been planned and the sector boundaries are to change. All changes are to be in place by January 2002. The horizontal lanes will then be 1,000 feet with a deviation of 50 feet at flight levels 290 to 410, in contrast to the 2000-foot layer of airspace previously allotted, with a possible deviation of 150 feet. However, certain military aircraft will still keep their distance at 2000 feet.

Nevertheless, despite this big change on the German front as a result of privatization, Belgium and the Netherlands are looking forward to managing flights above 29,500 feet. A perfect future would be management of the free-route airspace of 30,000-35,000 feet and above.

Training

The emerging image of Maastricht is one of growth, diversity and aviation-relevance. Schreiner too is a major player with its flight simulators and its allied School of Aviation (NLS). Originally established in 1927 as the country’s first pilot training school, NLS provides ab initio pilot training and airline training to JAR OPS requirements. The Maastricht School of Management (MSM) has also moved into training.

MSM was founded at the Netherlands’ premier engineering school Delft in 1952. Although the School’s base is in Maastricht, it also has locations as far a field as Cairo, Jakarta, Singapore and Shanghai. MSM teaches close to 2,000 students annually, with about 1,600 doing its global MBA. It has just set up an aviation management MBA in Jordan and has extensive links in the business (China - Hainan, Singapore and the Middle East).

Currently, MSM is developing an aviation focus and has students commuting to Maastricht, from as far away as the UK, to upgrade their qualifications with a part-time MBA in Aviation Management. Samantha Buchanan, KLM UK and Ireland’s passenger services manager at London-Gatwick, with 14 years experience in the industry, noted that one of the one of the attractions of the programme was meeting colleagues from different airlines. Buchanan’s tutorial group included a project manager from KLM’s technical department, a sales director from the Hungarian airline MALEV and an executive from Iberia Cargo.

The MSM programme has eight days of lectures in a three-month period. The lectures are preceded by an examination on the previous module, with four exams for each module. The first three modules are core subjects at foundation level. They may include economics and accounting. Business Economics will include airport and airline finance.

The course is taught in English, but the staff come from different places. Some of the professors are based at MSM. Then there are guest lecturers, like Statistics Professor, Ferrara from Florence University in Italy. The aviation people come from The Netherlands Aviation Academy, from Leiden University and Schiphol Airport.

There are home assignments, which mean longish papers. Statistics and accounting are worth 40% and the overall subject exam is worth 60%. The facilities in Maastricht are very good with excellent computer and library facilities. A residence adjoins the School and public transport comes virtually to the door. The University of Ottawa in Canada gives the third module in an exchange with MSM.

MSM is expanding its aviation programme with a global first scheduled for launch next year. A Memorandum of Understanding was signed (in May 2000) with the National School of Aviation (NLS) to develop a B.Sc. in Aeronautical Science, combining Air Transport Pilot Training and Aviation Management.

There is a lot of aviation business activity in Meuse-Rhine and opportunities for air traffic management and cargo specialists. For the ‘techies’ there are also aerospace programmes at the Universities of Liège and Aachen (RWTH).
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