Take into account:
– Address and describe the fundamental differences between the operating environments in the US and Europe.
– Consider how traffic is regulated in each place and the obstacles that must be overcome.
– Look into why there are differences in phraseology and procedures between the US and ICAO.
– Examine how there are different philosophies in the best way to move traffic between the two places. (to connect also our comparison to different cultures)
– How both places handle bad weather or whatever incidents (this can be par of the first chapter, where we discuss about structure)
– The difference between the way general aviation is regarded and handled in both places.
– Staffing and equipment (eg. how modern the equipment is) and investments.
The idea is to compare the USA Air traffic Control with the European ones
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The problem is that in Europe we don’t have a single ATC, we have something that goes into that direction, we have Eurocontrol and we have ideas about a Single Europeans Skies, but we don’t have a single authority or a single firm. We have different firms, in Germany the DFS, in Spain another one.
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So the solution is to compare the FAA with Europe (an European solution).
I think at the beginning of the thesis we could refer to the structure of ATC in the USA and to the structure of ATC in Europe and in particular we could also include this what they call ‘functional airspace blocks’ in Europe, (so more or less that the German ATC Authority would merge with the French one, and the Spanish would merge with the Portuguese one, something like this).
We have to discuss at first in the thesis the structure of ATC and we discuss possible problems or inefficiencies that come out of this 2 different structures.
So.. the FAA in the US, we have one Authority for all flights and in Europe we have a lot of small and larger somehow Authorities and this is in my view a sort of inefficiency. So we compare them and discuss possible inefficiencies out of this and we have to also comment in the intention of the European Union to this functional Airspace blocks.
This is the first part, I would say.
Then we have to continue comparing them, we don’t compare anymore on the structure but we compare also economic and business features.
-How business works in the US? And how business works in Europe?
And in this business I mean, how is regulation? How does the European Union or governments intervene in this market?
At second, what is the pricing principle? How do they price? (I mean, each airline pays a certain amount of money for having this ATC service) How is it structure? Possibly, we could have other or better price structures. This would be a really rough structure of my thesis.
So.. At first we compare the structure of the Authorities (How is the market?)
And at second we compare business features like regulations, pricing, and privatisation and so on forth.
Also it would be good if we assist what do we say with additional, lets say small performance data. (2 big & 2 small and so forth countries), because otherwise we have no other option. Then, we will try possibly to construct an index, a very easy parcial productivity index ‘flights per worker’, how many flights did they have in the US per worker that they use for ATC, or flights per Euro investment or per Dollar investment or flight hours because this is another output, like how many flight hours? And how many flight hours per worker? So, in order to solve this differences in the structure and this differences in the business or in regulation or in pricing, they have a huge impact on their performance of this two different systems.
This would be a really good approach, what do you think?
We have to go in detail, in depth and comment and discuss, covering little small single things.
