The European Coordination of Air Traffic Controllers’ Unions (ATCEUC) and the Cyprus Air Traffic Controllers Union (CYATCU) have called for urgent high-level international and European action to address long-standing flight safety risks in the Nicosia Flight Information Region (FIR), following a near-miss between a Turkish military aircraft and a civilian passenger plane.
In separate letters sent on Thursday, the two organisations warned that, 14 years after the European Commission described the situation in the Nicosia FIR as ‘unsustainable and unacceptable from a flight safety point of view’, no effective technical solution had been implemented.
The renewed calls follow an incident on the evening of August 19 involving a Turkish Air Force Airbus A400M transport aircraft and a TUI Airways Boeing 737-800 in the Nicosia FIR.
As ATCEUC describes, the Turkish military aircraft, operating under the callsign TUAF770, entered the Nicosia FIR without establishing communication and followed a trajectory different from its declared flight plan. It was climbing towards flight level FL360 in the northern part of the FIR, near the boundary with the Ankara FIR, while the civilian aircraft, flight TOM56T, was descending through FL350 on a converging trajectory.
A serious incident was avoided after air traffic controllers at the Nicosia Area Control Centre (ACC) identified the conflict and instructed the civilian aircraft to halt its descent, ATCEUC said.
The European federation said the incident showed that the long-standing problem in the Nicosia FIR remained unresolved, warning that Turkish military aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles continued to operate without effective coordination near critical air routes and Cyprus’s two main airports, Larnaca and Paphos.
CYATCU said the safety risks could no longer be left to the vigilance of individual controllers. It described the August 19 incident as ‘one visible moment in a pattern’ experienced by its members for years, saying controllers deal daily with unauthorised Turkish military aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles operating in the FIR without flight plans filed with Nicosia and without two-way communication.
‘The reason the Nicosia FIR has not yet recorded a fatal accident despite this conduct is not because the risk is being managed by any institution represented in this correspondence. It is because our members have, for decades, personally absorbed a risk that properly belongs to international enforcement,’ the union said.
The interventions come 14 years after the European Commission expressed concern over reported dangerous incidents in the Nicosia FIR. In a March 2012 letter to ATCEUC, the Commission said it was ‘deeply concerned’ about the reported increase in such incidents and the serious threat to aviation safety, adding that it was working to develop a satisfactory technical solution.
However, ATCEUC said no technical solution had since been announced, published or effectively implemented, while direct communication and coordination between the Ankara and Nicosia air traffic control centres had not been restored.
The federation has called for direct engagement by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a renewed high-level EU diplomatic initiative involving the European Commission, Cyprus and Trkiye, and a joint European Commission-EUROCONTROL safety assessment of the situation, including risks from military and unmanned aerial vehicle operations.
It also requested a clear, time-bound roadmap for restoring effective operational coordination.
CYATCU supported the demands and called for Nicosia ACC controllers to be directly involved in any safety assessment. It stressed that any solution should not come at Cyprus’s expense by restricting civil air traffic or reducing the island’s connectivity.
ATCEUC President Jean-Denis Larrère said the objective was to ensure that the skies over the Eastern Mediterranean were safe, predictable and governed by effective international cooperation and regulations.
‘The time has come to turn the commitments of 2012 into a sustainable technical solution,’ he said.