Row over Cyprus air control poses growing safety risk FEATURE 07/30/2010

Row over Cyprus air control poses growing safety risk

FEATURE 07/30/2010 NICOSIA — A decades-old dispute over the control of Cyprus airspace has sparked accusations of a growing safety risk as the volume of air traffic over the divided resort island expands. The Greek Cypriot head of Nicosia Air Traffic Control, which under international law is responsible for supervising the airspace over the island as well as a large slab of the adjacent eastern Mediterranean, says there have been near misses and that the number of incidents is growing. The rival Turkish Cypriot aviation authorities, who oversee flights between Turkey and the breakaway north of the island and claim jurisdiction over the surrounding airspace, acknowledge there is a problem but say the cause is the Nicosia controllers’ refusal to talk to them. “We’ve had a couple of very bad incidents,” said Nicosia air traffic chief Haris Antoniades. “We had a very, very serious case about 18 months ago,” Antoniades told AFP. “There was a Russian flight coming from the Egyptian airspace, flying through Nicosia to Turkey, to go to Russia, and then we had another flight coming south.... MORE Source:  The Daily Tribune URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20100730com6.html

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