Influx of Travelers Causes Chaos at Airports : Tourist Boom Overwhelms Europe

If you are coming to Europe this summer, a camp stool could prove as useful as a guide book, a light blanket for airport naps as valuable as traveler’s checks.

All over the continent, an unprecedented summer travel boom is straining facilities and tempers.

“It’s busier than it’s ever been,” Keith Mack, of Britain, air traffic chief for the European Parliament, complained as the madness mounted. “The whole of Europe is clogged.”

The way things have gone so far in this snafu summer, the situation at Rome’s airport one recent afternoon was fairly routine:

Waiting areas seemed more like refugee camps for the sweltering thousands of would-be travelers. In the cargo area, live eels from Canada and lobsters from Morocco stewed in 95-degree heat for want of a customs inspector. And out on the tarmac, about 60 jets were parked helter-skelter, awaiting food, fuel, baggage, crew, passengers or just permission to fly.

Newspaper Ads on Efficiency

What made that day memorable were the big newspaper ads placed by Rome’s Fiumicino airport to boast of its efficiency. They turned out to be a masterpiece of bad timing.

Within 48 hours, chaos in the Italian skies had brought a parliamentary inquiry, the forced resignation of the head of Alitalia, the beleaguered national airline, emergency flight restrictions and the opening of some military air routes to civil aviation in a belated effort to expand air space.

Alitalia director Umberto Nordio had been under fire from Alitalia’s parent company for poor service, for “myopic management” and “reactionary policies.” A sign of the times: At 1 o’clock on a recent black morning in Milan, 170 Alitalia passengers who were to have left six hours earlier revolted and tried to storm a plane bound for Rome.

The Italian theme is being replayed with variations throughout Western Europe. Flight delays of up to three hours have become almost routine, and experts forecast that they will continue to be the rule rather than the exception until the end of summer.

Last week the European Parliament, meeting in Strasbourg, France, adopted a resolution complaining that congestion in the air and limited airport capacity have led to delays, “not only causing major inconvenience to passengers but also reducing safety.”

Because of ground delays, it took a French jet 10 hours to make the 75-minute flight from Paris to Nice. The takeoff of a British charter flight bound for Spain was delayed 20 hours. With charter and private traffic adding to the strain, air traffic systems in France, Spain and Greece are at the breaking point. Milan’s Linate airport, second to Fiumicino on the Italian horror list, imposed a limit last week on the number of flights it will accommodate henceforth.

Some days are so bad that flights are held on the ground until they get guaranteed permission to enter another country’s air space. Other planes are forced into holding patterns while awaiting permission to fly into the next country. At one point last week, 10 London-bound jets, one above the other, flew lazy circles in a holding pattern over Belgium.

“Chaos!” headlines in one country after another have declared.

Affluence on both sides of the Atlantic and around the Pacific Rim is the principal villain this holiday season.

The number of Britons vacationing abroad has tripled to 21 million in 12 years. With Spain, France, Italy, Greece and other Mediterranean sun-belt countries among the world’s favorite vacation places, there is not enough sky to accommodate the millions who want to fly. This year there will be nearly 20% more European flights than there were in 1986.

Nearly 10,000 flights carrying more than 800,000 passengers vie for space every day in European skies--only about half the size of America’s and in fact even smaller because large areas are reserved for military use.

Bad weather in one country, a power failure in another or labor unrest in a third can have a snowball effect throughout Western Europe.

If Europe is bad, Italy is the worst. Hannibal’s elephants and ancient barbarian invaders probably encountered fewer problems traveling around Italy than do contemporary tourists. The U.S. Embassy is hard put to deal with calls from anguished American travelers.

But it is not just foreigners and not just tourists who are suffering. At Milan’s best hotels, the reservations of no-show guests are automatically extended on the assumption that a flight has been delayed.

In Italy, trouble with the overburdened airline system is vastly compounded by strikes--in as many flavors as there are Italian ices. In recent weeks there have been strikes, go-slows and work-to-rule actions by pilots, customs officials, radar operators, traffic controllers, ground staff, baggage handlers and fuel deliverers.

Newspapers publish strike timetables to warn travelers.

Sometimes the strikers want more money, and sometimes, like the customs agents, they want more staff to ease their workload. The Italian drama plays to a loud passing of the buck as everybody blames the government-controlled airlines, which blame the government-controlled airports, whose managers blame the government.

Everybody has his favorite horror story of delay and frustration. Every day the politicians swear it cannot continue.

Safety does not seem to have suffered, but in Italy at least there have been moments of high drama and low humor.

Folk Hero Pilot

DC-9 pilot Paolo Pittoni is something of a folk hero. Four hours late leaving Rome one night, he shaved nearly 20 minutes off the normal flight time to Reggio Calabria in the hope of arriving before the airport’s 1 a.m. closing. At 1:08 a.m., with Pittoni on his final approach, just 60 seconds from touchdown, the runway lights flicked off, the radio went dead, the control tower blacked out and the airport staff went home.

With passengers in an uproar and one of them showing symptoms of heart attack, Pittoni aborted his landing and diverted to another airport more than 100 miles away. The passengers took a bus home.

The airport staff said later that Pittoni had no authorization to land and no business trying to sneak in when he knew it was past time for them to go home. Three different groups of government investigators say otherwise: Two flight controllers have been suspended while a judge decides whether to press criminal charges.