Is flying really more risky now?

The aviation industry is all about confidence. When you strap on your seat belt, you want to have complete faith in every aspect of the service. Best of all, you don't want to have to think about the pilot's training, the aircraft manufacturer's competence or your fellow passengers' state of drunkenness.

The problem with air traffic control is that it has been in the news too much lately. Air passengers don't really want to have to think about the mechanics of how their aircraft are manoeuvred around what seems like a very crowded airspace. There are always news stories about air traffic control at this time of the year, but this summer it is different. The Government has undermined confidence in the system by pushing through a part privatisation - a public-private partnership - of National Air Traffic Services against the advice of many experts and the desires of the controllers.

The privatisation has already run into trouble. Because of the reduction in transatlantic travel after 11 September, NATS is in financial difficulties. It has had to be bailed out with a government loan and extra cash from its new owners, the main UK airlines. NATS has not been allowed by the regulator to raise its charges, and therefore is limping along, a far cry from the Government's vision of creating a prosperous company able to invest without troubling the Exchequer.

But despite the reduction in transatlantic flights, British airspace has been particularly busy. The huge increase in low-cost carriers has added a staggering 40 new destinations to the schedules since last summer. These short-haul flights require much more attention from air traffic controllers than a flight which simply leaves British airspace to cross the Atlantic, but it has not improved the finances of NATS because its payments are based on mileage and size of aircraft.

The leak earlier this week of an internal paper outlining how during one week in early July there had been 3,500 extra hours of flight delays attributed to problems at the new air traffic control centre at Swanwick is a further blow to confidence in the system. The main cause is a lack of controllers. Shockingly, the service, is short of about 40 controllers, who earn between £40,000 and £60,000 per year, most of whom are on training courses.

The difficulties of NATS have been compounded by the fact that the privatisation was carried out at time when it was transferring the major part of its operations to the new £623 million control centre at Swanwick, near South ampton. (When this opened in January, it was five years late and more than double the original budget.)

Swanwick has been beset by the usual kinds of computer glitches for such big projects. It controls all airspace above England and Wales, apart from a box around London, the busiest section in the country, where flights below 20,000ft are looked after by the old West Drayton centre.

Indeed, amazingly, there is still not one standardised computer system for the two centres, and it is this interface that has caused at least two breakdowns at Swanwick. The public has sensed that something is amiss, making people uneasy about flying. They see the privatisation of the railways, though presented as not affecting safety, as having led to a number of major accidents where the cause was lack of communication between the companies which took over the service.

Fortunately, the fragmentation of the air industry has not occurred. NATS, which was to be sold off to a private company, was - under pressure from the unions and the public - bought by a consortium of airlines which have an obvious commercial interest in maintaining safety in the skies, whatever the cost. This, however, creates in air passengers a niggling fear, perhaps unwarranted, that safety is not the core concern of the financially stricken NATS - which it was befo re privatisation.

In fact, passengers may be relieved to know that despite a few screaming headlines about near-misses and last month's awful air collision in which 71 people, mainly Russian schoolchildren, were killed on the Swiss-German border, recent statistics show that British airspace seems to be getting safer.

Last year was the first in which there were no Category A - those posing a serious risk of collision - nearmisses recorded by the independent UK Airprox board since its creation in the 1980s. Moreover, in the first seven months of this year, there have been 39 near-misses of all categories, compared with 54 in the same period last year. This is hardly surprising. Safety should improve over time. The new centre at Swanwick has increased capacity with improved technology, and there is a much better working environment for the controllers. Moreover, planes must now be fitted with TCAS, the collision avoidance system which warns pilots if they are "in conflict" with another aircraft.

Although the management stresses that the system is safe, there is no doubt that NATS is under particular strain this year, compounded by privatisation.

Already flight delays are on the increase from last year's average figure of 15 minutes and, as one insider admitted yesterday, "there are going to be some bad days ahead in August". Ministers are privately worried about the prospect of an accident or, more likely, a series of major delays. As a former transport minister put it to me, "NATS should not have been privatised in that way. If we had thought about it properly, we would have done something quite different."

The Labour- dominated House of Commons Transport Committee has been quick to point out the failings in the NATS privatisation. Its damning report published last month said the PPP for NATS "was not appropriate and should be reviewed before it does terminal damage to United Kingdom's aviation industry".

NATS, like the privatisation of the railways and the Tube, was sold off at the instigation of the Treasury, hung up on arcane rules about government spending, rather than out of any aim to improve the lot of passengers.

If the airports become clogged with angry passengers this summer, there is no doubt whom they will blame.