The president of the Fuerteventura Island Council, Lola García, has written to the Minister of Transport and Sustainable Mobility, Óscar Puente, to immediately supervise the service provided by the air traffic control at Fuerteventura Airport.
The Fuerteventura control tower is one of the towers that the Spanish Government privatized at the time, despite the opposition of local administrations, including the Cabildo of Fuerteventura itself, concerned about the possible degradation of the quality of service.
Now the Air Traffic Controllers Union (USCA) has requested the precautionary suspension of the accreditation of the private company SAERCO, which is the concessionaire of the Fuerteventura tower, and its replacement by the public company ENAIRE. They warn that the safety of the operations at the airports managed by SAERCO may be affected by the degradation of the working conditions as a result of its financial problems, which have been acknowledged by the company itself in court. In the Canary Islands, SAERCO has been awarded the air traffic control at the airports of La Palma, Lanzarote and Fuerteventura.
“In Fuerteventura, and I am sure that in the rest of the affected islands, we follow with great concern this news, because our economy and in general our way of life, depends directly on the proper functioning of the airport, starting with its control tower,” said the president of the Cabildo.
That is why Lola García calls for “a thorough review of the conditions under which this concession is developed to ensure safety, and to do what is necessary to recover its operation as a basic and public service. Not only in a transitory way, as USCA proposes, but a definitive recovery. Exactly under the same conditions as the rest of Spanish airports with non-privatized control towers”.
Lola Garcia recalls that already at the time the Cabildo of Fuerteventura, like the rest of Fuerteventura and Canary Islands institutions, expressed its disagreement with the privatization of these basic services.
