Annual Monitoring Report 2020 - Switzerland
Contextual information
National performance plan adopted following Commission Decision (EU) 2023/178 of 14 December 2022
List of ACCs 2
Geneva ACC
Zurich ACC
No of airports in the scope of the performance plan
≥80’K 2
<80’K 0
Exchange rate (1 EUR=)
2017: 1.11124 CHF
2020: 1.07001 CHF
Share of Union-wide traffic (TSUs) 2020 1.2%
Share of Union-wide en route costs 2020 2.7%
Share en route / terminal costs 2020 65% / 35%
En route charging zone(s)
Switzerland
Terminal charging zone(s)
Switzerland
Main ANSP
• Skyguide
Other ANSPs
–
MET Providers
• Office Féderal de la Météorologie et de Climatologie MétéoSuisse
Traffic (En route traffic zone)
▪ Switzerland recorded 477K actual IFR movements in 2020, -59% compared to 2019 (1,177K).
▪ Switzerland IFR movements reduced more than the average reduction at Union-wide level (-57%).
▪ Switzerland recorded 650K actual en route service units in 2020, -63% compared to 2019 (1,769K).
▪ Switzerland service units reduced more than the average reduction at Union-wide level (-57%).
Safety (Main ANSP)
▪ Skyguide achieved the RP3 EoSM targets in all management objectives except safety risk management.
▪ The NSA provided no information as to the measures taken to improve safety risk management, but the NSA explained that no circumstance should prevent Skyguide from achieving the target during RP3.
▪ The EoSM performance in 2020 in some of the management objectives is lower than expected based on the maturity achieved at the end of RP2. Skyguide needs to improve maturity in all three questions used to measure the maturity in the safety risk management objective. This should be realistic to achieve during RP3.
▪ Switzerland recorded better performance with respect to safety occurrences with lower rates of SMIs and RIs in 2020 compared to 2019.
▪ Skyguide should improve its SMS by implementing automated safety data recording systems for RIs.
Environment (Member State)
▪ FABEC stated that half of the Union-wide RAD simplifications applied in 2020 were within FABEC airspace and that eNM measures were not needed. This helped improve the shortest constrained routes within FABEC, but was not sufficient in helping to reach the FAB-level KEA reference value (2.90%) in 2020.
▪ FABEC also mentioned that KEA is proportional to delays and stated that this had an impact on the environment performance. The PRB does not agree with this as FABEC did not experience significant delays in 2020.
▪ Switzerland improved KEA relative to 2019 in 2020 achieving 4.21%.
▪ The share of flights operating CCO/CDO at Swiss airports improved in 2020 compared to 2019, although the CDO performance still remains quite low at 20%. The additional time airspace users spent taxiing or holding in terminal airspace reduced by 41% compared to 2019.
Capacity (Member State)
▪ Skyguide recorded 0.04 minutes of average en route ATFM delay per flight, thus performing better than the local breakdown value of 0.33.
▪ Delays must be considered in the context of the traffic evolution: IFR movements in 2020 were 59% below the 2019 levels in Switzerland.
▪ Switzerland was the only Member State to report significant delays throughout the year in 2020 due to ATC capacity and staffing reasons. The PRB believes that with such low levels of traffic, ATC capacity and staffing issues were avoidable and recommends that capacity improvement measures are implemented before traffic recovers.
▪ Switzerland reported a decrease of over 6% in ATCO FTE numbers in Zurich ACC, while an almost 3% increase in Geneva ACC in 2020 compared to 2019 values.
▪ Delays were mostly related to adverse weather conditions and ATC capacity issues.
▪ The share of delayed flights with delays longer than 15 minutes in Switzerland increased by 1.61 percentage points compared to 2019.
▪ The yearly total of sector opening hours in Geneva ACC was 21,088, showing a 34.8% decrease compared to 2019. The yearly total of sector opening hours in Zurich ACC was 21,172, showing a 40.3% decrease compared to 2019.
▪ Geneva ACC registered 12.89 IFR movements per one sector opening hour in 2020, being 38.9% below 2019 levels. Zurich ACC registered 15.42 IFR movements per one sector opening hour in 2020, being 33.5% below 2019 levels.
Cost-efficiency (En route/Terminal charging zone(s))
▪ Switzerland incurred the second largest decrease in service units, with 2020 actual service units (650K) being 62% lower than the actual service units in 2019 (1,708K).
▪ Switzerland incurred the second highest percentage increase in total costs across all Member States in 2020, with a 19M€2017 (+13%) increase compared to 2019 actual costs. The increase is driven by 17M€2017 higher staff costs (+17%) and 3.3M€2017 higher other operating costs (+13%).
▪ Skyguide spent 47M€2017 related to cost of investments in 2020, 8% less than planned in the 2019 draft performance plan (51M€2017). The reduction can be explained by a decrease of cost of capital, by reason of an asset base decrease.