The air transport industry tends to suffer increasingly from a lack of adequate airspace and airport capacity. Congestion in Europe and North America has increased dramatically in the past decade, with a growing number of flight delays due to airspace congestion and overcrowding at airports.

Inadequate air transport infrastructure costs the world economy billions of dollars each year. The increasing number of delays disrupt ground operations, gate assignments, crew schedules and passenger itineraries whilst also producing additional energy consumption and emissions.

According to EUROCONTROL's Performance Review Commission report, if there is no additional airspace capacity, a 1% increase in demand generates some 6% increase in ATM delays with their subsequent environmental impact. ATAG strongly supports implementation of air traffic management - communications, navigations and surveillance (ATM_cns) systems that are satellite rather than ground-based, in order to reduce congestion and increase capacity. Indeed, ATAG and IATA produced a brochure in 2003 entitled "One Sky... global ATM - the way forward" presented to Ministers at the ICAO Air Navigation Conference in Montreal to put forward their views.

The industry is facing growing difficulties to fully meet the demands of today's travelling public and shippers of air freight, and radical changes are needed now to prevent the situation from becoming unmanageable. If future capacity does not match demand, not only will delays increase - so will the costs of using the system, coupled with decreased choices of service.