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Most frequent flyers know this feeling: the plane starts to descend, but instead of heading towards the runway, the plane starts circling overhead.
This is not necessarily a mistake or bad weather. Often, this is a holding pattern – a maneuver that keeps planes in the air until there is room for them to land.
This is one symptom of increasingly congested skies, where storms, emergencies or route closures in one place can cause delays thousands of kilometers away.
The bill was huge. In Europe alone, air traffic management delays are expected to cost $2.3 billion or more by 2025, according to EUROCONTROL, the continent’s air navigation agency.
Green light
What if countries coordinated their flights like a city synchronizes its traffic lights?
That’s the idea behind the International Civil Aviation Organization’s push (ICAO), the UN agency that sets global aviation standards.
“If traffic lights work independently, traffic becomes chaotic and there are jams at every corner,” ICAO Secretary General Juan Carlos Salazar told AFP. UN News.
“If you get a green light on one road and stop on the next road, then congestion will soon occur. The same thing happens with air traffic throughout the world’s airspace.”
The repairs started long before landing. If an airport knows that it cannot accommodate more planes for a while, it can coordinate with other airports to delay departures, rather than letting planes circle overhead.
This approach, known as air traffic flow management, allows airlines, airports, controllers and weather services to share information and make joint decisions.
Air traffic over the city.
Need to know
Some countries already use them, but their benefits are limited when national systems do not communicate with each other. After five days of talks in Montreal hosted by ICAO, governments and industry backed a faster global rollout.
For passengers, this means early warning about cancellations and delays as well as faster recovery if something goes wrong.
“When people get to the airport, wait all day and no one tells them anything, that creates a big problem,” Salazar said.
Distractions snowball, he explained. Problems lasting an hour or a day will hit every flight scheduled afterward and the current system is slow to bounce back.
Minutes, money and fuel
The benefits can already be measured. In the Americas, collaborative trials supported by ICAO saved more than 265,000 minutes of flight time by 2026, about 4,400 hours, and more than $38.9 million.
They also saved approximately 13,330 tons of fuel and avoided 42,160 tons of carbon dioxide emissions, which is a contribution to the goal of net zero carbon emissions from international aviation by 2050.
In Europe, the EUROCONTROL program anticipating weather and congestion avoided about 3.1 million minutes of delays between May and August 2026, saving about $448 million and making the network 14 percent more stable on the worst days.
Airlines will carry nearly five billion passengers on 38 million flights by 2025, according to ICAO.
Sharing is the hard part
Brazil and Colombia have operated such systems for years, Salazar said, but mostly at the national level while international flights traverse the airspace of many countries.
“Technology alone is not the answer,” he said. Information needs to be shared and often isn’t, sometimes because of a lack of will, sometimes because of a lack of means to share it in real-time.
“Flights from Europe to Australia or New Zealand go over four or five different regions, continents and require very good coordination that doesn’t exist today,” he said. “No country or region acting alone can address this.”
ICAO, with 193 member countries, sets common standards and provides technical assistance so that countries can coordinate regardless of resources. New international regulations on flow management will be established in November 2030, and a regional workshop is planned for 2027.
The pressure is increasing. ICAO projects that air travel could reach 12.4 billion passengers by 2050.
Busier skies
Other challenges are piling up. The conflict forces airlines to change routes around the danger zone, creating new bottlenecks. Drones, air taxis, rocket launches, and unplanned re-entry of objects from orbit all require closer coordination.
For Mr. Salazar, the goal is simple: “an air transportation system that reaches everyone in the world, so that everyone can benefit from being connected to the internet.”
