Why proper planning matters

An Executive Interview with SAL Consultants

Douglas Spragg, CEO of airport planning and air traffic management firm SAL Consultants, reveals the challenges facing the Middle East’s aviation authorities.

The Middle East has undergone a major makeover in recent years. What factors do authorities planning the expansion or modernisation of their airport facilities need to take into consideration before embarking on such a project?
Douglas Spragg. One of the problems in the Gulf area is the compression of the air space. There’s obviously going to be a very high traffic requirement for transport in the region, given that it is a major route to and from Europe, and also to the Middle and Far East. So any modernisation or new airfields must take into account the probable limiting factor of the air space itself. 

I think the Gulf states need to get together as a regional authority to try to make their rules and regulations more common, their separation standards more easy to cope with, and to better define the intersections between the air space of one country and the air space of another.

We had a similar problem in Europe in the early 1990s; a typical example is the air space from southern Spain and Portugal to the Canary Islands. At the time there were four-hour delays on that route. We discovered that they were using the wrong separation standards, which meant that instead of being able to run an aircraft every 10 minutes, they were running at 15-minute intervals instead. So we redesigned all the air space into parallel routes, which is how it is now. Since then there’s not been too much of a problem with capacity.

And this is something that has yet to be done in the Middle East region?
DS. Yes, and that’s where I think we can provide some very useful input: being able to talk to the various people involved about the different issues. The biggest problem is how to balance the wish to increase the capacity of all the airports in the region with the actual airspace available. You’ve got Sharjah. Just 10 miles further south you’ve got the existing Dubai airport, and then about 40 miles further south you’ve got the new Jebel Ali airport. Then you come down to Abu Dhabi. It’s quite a crowded piece of air space. You’ve also got sensitive issues on the other side of the Gulf regarding military aviation. So a major issue is going to be how best to coordinate between all those different airport authorities, as well as between the civil aviation bodies and the military.

Presumably this is something that needs to be tackled fairly quickly given the rate at which the Middle Eastern states are pursuing their expansion plans…
DS. I think if you’re going to expand it’s essential to have a bird’s eye view of the transport systems that are already there. For instance, if you look at the existing road network around the Gulf, it is probably less than perfect for the sheer number of people that use it. But in order to have efficient air transport you also need to have efficient surface transport systems as well. It may well be that in certain areas a rail link between two major centres may be more efficient than a road network. So there’s that aspect to consider. And then of course you’ve got to take shipping into account, again an important transport alternative. Is shipping the best method of linking up within the Gulf, or is that more efficient for linking with centres outside of the Gulf? So I think it’s calling for a really big overview of the total problem there, and that total problem is related to ground, air and sea.

Do you have any plans in terms of further activities within the Middle East?
DS. We’d like to try to reintroduce this idea of developing a global transport solution for the Gulf rather than just air or road or sea. Take a much more holistic view. We’re not going to get very far without taking and grasping the idea of having a total transport review for the Gulf area. It is so important for the region’s future development, and I think that is where we can come in – just introducing some of the ideas. We’ve got an awful lot of experienced people that have been there and done it all before.

Douglas Spragg, the CEO of SAL Consultants, a company registered in 1985 as Shrives Associates Ltd, has an operational background based on twenty years experience as an Air Traffic Controller in the Department of Civil Aviation in Australia and in the National Air Traffic Services in the UK. He has spent the past 20 years in the development field for the definition of future systems and the Human Machine Interface together with some years in the provision of an advisory service for the European Civil Aviation Conference Member States. He retired after seventeen 17 years in Eurocontrol at the beginning of 2002.