7. Travelling by air

Here are some of the issues regarding air travel

• Handling enough aircraft at airports (capacity)
• Security
• Air safety
• Noise
• Greenhouse gases
• Air traffic control

One the the bottlenecks at the moment is the sheer number of aircraft using busy airports such as Heathrow. They must keep an official safe distance from one another as they take off and land. This safe distance determines how many planes can use the airport at any one time especially in poor weather conditions.

Advanced Air Traffic Control

The distance between planes on landing and takeoff is determined by the air traffic controllers. In the future, their control systems, consisting of 3D radar, real-time position feeds from the planes themselves along with advanced computer systems will together allow the controllers to safely bring the planes a bit closer and so increase capacity.

Aircraft will also communicate with each other automatically, exchanging position and speed data, so their onboard computers can warn of getting too close.

Single European Sky

If you want to fly from Athens in Greece, to Munich in Germany, the aircraft has to fly a very wiggly route including a loop!

Why? Well it is because every country in Europe has its own rules about flight paths over its land. The pilot cannot simply choose a straight line between the cities.

This wastes fuel, increases cost, takes longer, increases greenhouse gases, shortens the working life of the aircraft. In fact there is nothing good about a patchwork of national air spaces.

So there is a plan to have a single European air space called the 'Single European Sky'. To support this, all air traffic control will use a single system called 'SESAR' (Single European Sky Management Research'.

See an official 9 minute video clip (This is a youTube video) explaining what will happen.

Their official web site here.

Advanced whole body scanners

Everyone wants a safe flight. And so the traditional X-Ray and metal detection scanners used at airports are being supplemented by whole body scanners based on millimeter radar technology.

These new scanners can 'see' through clothes and reveal any object (metal or otherwise) that a person may be carrying.

They are a bit controversial as some people feel it is an invasion of privacy for airport staff to see such images.

But it is a balance that has to be struck between security and privacy. What is your opinion of this technology?

They are also very expensive and so smaller airports are less likely to install them.

Biometric passports and databases

In the UK, all new passports are 'ePassports'. These contain biometric data and a history of your travels held in an embedded microchip.

At large airports you walk into the automated gate system for ePassports where you place your passport into a reader. You also look into a camera. The face recognition system then compares the biometric data held in the passport against the captured image. If everything is OK, it lets you through, otherwise staff standing by will take over.

Their advantage is they improve security and can track journeys over time. The disadvantage is they are slower than the traditional method because many people are unfamiliar with what to do, and so slow down the queue.

In the USA, all visa holders have to allow their fingerprints to be scanned digitally and a front and side image of your face taken.

One of the disadvantages is that it takes much longer to get through security, but the advantage for the USA is that they have a digital record of all non-citizens entering the country.