AIRSPACE AND TRAFFIC FLOW MANAGEMENT

A major concern for Allied Force mission planners entailed the coordination of air operations with so many allied aircraft transiting the relatively dense and compact airspace between Italy and the Balkans. Among other things, the CAOC coordinated operations by some 200 NATO tanker aircraft operating out of eight countries to support strikers flying from 15 bases in Germany, France, Italy, Hungary, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.[356]There were numerous reported instances of near‑midair collisions caused by marginal weather and an insufficiency of battle management information relayed by AWACS to friendly aircraft operating in and near the combat zone. Mission planners at the CAOC sought to deconflict allied aircraft by parceling out the most impacted airspace so that only a given number of friendly aircraft would be operating inside any block at a given time. The danger of midair collisions was of particular concern in designated engagement zones, or “kill boxes,” in the KEZ, with only a few allied aircraft being permitted to operate within a given box at any time for that reason. Both the E‑3 AWACS and the EC‑130 ABCCC carried copies of the daily ATO, which allowed them to keep track of scheduled flight operations and remind allied aircrews of pertinent details as necessary. Another problem caused by the unusually congested airspace over and near Yugoslavia entailed linking some combat aircraft with their assigned tankers, particularly the German Tornado ECR variants and the EA‑6B, which lacked air‑to‑air radars and had to be vectored to their tankers by AWACS.[357]

In an important contribution to easing the air traffic nightmare that threatened to ensue over the Adriatic and in the adjacent airspace as the air effort unfolded, Italian air traffic authorities lent their expertise to the CAOC’s air traffic control cell in order to make key staffers there more familiar with Italian airspace structure and regulations. They also dispatched a representative to the military cell of the regional civilian air traffic control (ATC) center to smooth out potential difficulties in controlling the heavy flow of ATO sorties going in and out of the area of responsibility (AOR). Measures taken to manage that flow and to deconflict it from civil traffic included closing the airspace over parts of the Adriatic, establishing a no‑fly zone encompassing the airports of Bari and Brindisi, suppressing all or parts of some airways, establishing a special corridor to permit the transit of Italian airspace by air traffic entering from outside the AOR, providing a system of safe operating routes to allow the departure and return of combat aircraft loaded with weapons operating from Italian air bases, and establishing six emergency weapons jettison areas in international waters and six active inflight refueling zones over the Adriatic 24 hours a day.

Not surprisingly, the Italian ATC system experienced considerable difficulty in handling this large volume of daily traffic. To begin with, because of the air war’s length and the shortage of available controllers, ATC found it a major challenge to maintain round‑the‑clock control of all the active and alternate military airfields that were involved in air operations. Second, Eurocontrol experienced problems managing civil aviation flight plans, given the density of military traffic, and was not always able to maintain the impermeability of the posted no‑fly zone over the Adriatic. Third, ATC was frequently unable to track military aircraft operating from the several aircraft carriers that were deployed in the Adriatic and, for that reason, faced serious deconfliction problems with civil traffic flying along the southern air routes toward Greece and Turkey. Fourth, communication problems were often encountered between and among the various agencies engaged in air traffic flow management, such as airfield control towers, approach and departure control centers, military regional control, air defense radars, and AWACS. Finally, there was far too little time available to debug, test, and properly validate these highly jury‑rigged arrangements. Although the system worked in the end with no catastrophic or otherwise untoward incidents, numerous aircrews reported that the aerial traffic jams of ingressing and egressing NATO aircraft transiting the AOR throughout Allied Force often appeared more dangerous than the threat presented by Serbia’s SAMs and AAA.[358]

As it unfolded and expanded in scope and intensity, Operation Allied Force became the largest civilian emergency ever confronted by the airlines, although it produced little major traffic dislocation in the end. Before the cold war ended, there had been only two options from which to choose–either a peacetime operating mode, with the military taking only a small portion of the available airspace and time for training, or a wartime mode, with no civil operations whatever and unrestricted military flying. This time, as NATO’s top official on civil airspace put it, the coalition was “waging what we may plainly call war in a localized area of Europe, while throughout the rest of the continent it was business as usual.”[359]The situation required air traffic controllers to reroute as many as 8,000 airliners a day on some occasions. One concern was that inconveniencing civilians at peak summer travel time would erode public support and cause a backlash against the effort. Another was to avoid any replay of the downing of an Iranian airliner, which the cruiser USS Vincennes mistook for an Iranian F‑14 over the Persian Gulf in 1988. That latter concern led to a double‑checking of identification procedures for electronically identifying aircraft operating in and near the combat zone. Toward the end of the air war, NATO finally succeeded in easing the airspace congestion problem at least marginally, when it in effect opened a second front by initiating Marine F/A‑18D operations out of Hungary and USAF fighter operations out of Turkey.