Airlines award top marks for safety

Three quarters of all airlines are satisfied or very satisfied with the services provided by the German air navigation service provider, DFS Deutsche Flugsicherung GmbH, and its partners in the Functional Airspace Block Europe Central (FABEC). This is the result of a customer survey that was recently conducted. Compared with the previous survey, DFS has further improved in the fields of safety, capacity and efficient routing, achieving marks above the average of FABEC's overall result.

The primary focus was on the safe and orderly handling of air traffic. Eighty-four percent of the customers are satisfied or very satisfied with the performance. However, punctuality and cost-efficiency also play an important role. The recent FABEC survey shows that the air navigation service providers were rated good to very good in these fields, too.

About 100 airlines, which generate 85 percent of the revenue from air navigation charges within FABEC, were surveyed. The largest airlines include Air France, Easyjet, KLM, Lufthansa and SWISS.

The airlines, too, used the survey to formulate their suggestions for improvements in terms of airspace capacity and cost-efficiency. Concerns were expressed, in particular, about the ability of air navigation service providers to provide sufficient capacity for potential increases in traffic.

The previous FABEC-wide customer satisfaction survey was conducted in 2012/2013. The results of such surveys are taken as a basis for action plans used by air navigation service providers and within FABEC to improve their services.

In the Functional Airspace Block Europe Central (FABEC), DFS works together with the air navigation service providers of Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, as well as with the EUROCONTROL Centre in Maastricht. Approximately 5.6 million flights are controlled in the entire FABEC airspace per year.