The Ministry of Development and the public company Spanish Airports and Air Navigation (AENA) intend to obtain a higher quality service that guarantees safety with fewer controllers when, at the end of next year, the first phase of liberalization of tower control in 13 airports ends, three of them in the Canary Islands.
Specifically, Fuerteventura, La Palma and Lanzarote will have controllers who will depend on companies to which AENA awards the service when this process that begins now and will culminate in approximately 7 months ends. This was announced on December 14 before the Congress of Deputies by the head of Development, José Blanco, and appears in an order from the Ministry published this Wednesday in the Official State Gazette (BOE).
The order details that the control of those airports that do not provide approach control, which are not air bases open to civil traffic or have an AFIS service, will be put out to tender and will have controllers dependent on private companies.
As explained by the Secretary of State for Transport, Isaías Taguas, once the three lots into which the 13 airports have been divided have been awarded (the three Canary Islands form a single lot), the AENA controllers who are providing service in these must choose between three options. Thus, they may continue to depend on the public company but be transferred to another center that is assigned to them, accept the conditions of the concessionaire and continue in the same tower or be compensated "as required by law".
The aim of this measure is to "improve the quality of the service", said the president of AENA, Juan Ignacio Lema. In that sense, he added that "the passenger will be the great beneficiary of this reform because a series of quality parameters will be set, including some related to punctuality." The savings that the liberalization of the towers will mean for AENA (the controllers of private companies will charge less than the current ones) "will have an impact on navigation fees and ticket costs".
Lema himself acknowledged, when asked by ACN Press, that "if it is possible to do the same work with fewer controllers, always guaranteeing quality and safety and under the supervision of AENA and the Spanish Aviation Safety Agency, of course the company would do it".
In total there are 48 controllers in the three Canary Islands airports that are grouped in the so-called 'Lot 3'. Fuerteventura has 18 controllers, La Palma 11 and Lanzarote 19; although this figure is likely to decrease. In any case, the president of the public manager of airports and navigation explained that "the number of controllers will be set by AENA". Currently, there are 214 controllers affected in the 13 airports.
The towers of the rest of the Spanish airports that do not use the AFIS system (as is the case of La Gomera and El Hierro) and that provide the approach control service will be liberalized soon, after deciding how to combine this (which will remain in the hands of AENA) with the outsourced one. In this case are the airports of Gran Canaria, Tenerife Norte and Tenerife Sur. As the minister said at the time, it will be done "in a second stage, to be developed from 2012".
Companies
To be eligible to be awarded the tower control, companies must meet certain technical requirements (accreditation before the Spanish Aviation Safety Agency) and experience (which may be given by having controllers in their staff or by having technological partners from the EU that already develop these services in their countries).
Lema explained that six companies are in the process of being accredited before the Agency. These, in some cases, are part of construction and infrastructure management groups. The companies that have started the process are Ferroser (owned by Ferrovial), Clece (owned by ACS), Tower ATS (Indra), Navsa (Fomento de Construcciones y Contratas), Saerco and Gesnai.
The president of AENA announced this order to the controllers last Tuesday. Lema met with the leadership of the Air Controllers Union (USCA) in a meeting that he described as "good-natured". In addition, he stated that "the controllers already knew something, as it has been said that they were studying to create a company to compete for the tender".
The Ministry hopes that liberalization will prevent situations such as the one experienced on December 3, when the controllers massively abandoned their jobs and which led the Government to declare a State of Alarm on the 4th. However, they warn that "we will use all the measures provided for in our Rule of Law to ensure that this does not happen again".
ACN