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The control tower at Malaga Airport. Salvador Salas
Government asked to 'review' privatisation plans for Malaga's air traffic control tower

Government asked to 'review' privatisation plans for Malaga's air traffic control tower

TRANSPORT ·

Local ATC staff were happy with the Congress vote which did not back the move to privatise the Costa del Sol control tower nor those at Bilbao, Santiago-Rosalía de Castro, Palma de Mallorca, Gran Canaria, Tenerife South and Tenerife North

Ignacio Lillo

Malaga

Wednesday, 8 March 2023

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The air traffic control tower at Malaga Airport will not be privatised, or at least not immediately, as the airport operator Aena and the Ministry of Transport originally intended.

The local air traffic controllers were happy with the vote at the transport commission in Congress on Tuesday which did not back the move to privatise the Costa del Sol control tower nor those at Bilbao, Santiago-Rosalía de Castro, Palma de Mallorca, Gran Canaria, Tenerife South and Tenerife North, as envisaged.

PSOE introduced a transactional amendment, by which the majority of the parties approved asking the government to "open a negotiation process in which to proceed to the revision" of the ministerial order. The text finally received the favourable vote of the parties, EH Bildu, Esquerra Republicana and BNG, that initially presented the motion together with PSOE and Podemos. Vox voted against the motion, while PP and Ciudadanos abstained, according to data provided by representatives of air traffic controllers at the national level.

The group believes that after the commission's request, the process will be put on hold, and will have to be debated in the Congress of Deputies, which will mean opening the debate to political groups and public opinion.

As SUR has previously reported, Malaga Airport could lose quality and future development prospects with a privatised tower, which has been underlined by the air traffic controllers, Malaga City Hall, the Diputacion, (Malaga's provincial authority), and Tursimo Costa del Sol.

Air passengers would not see a benefit in flight ticket prices as is evidenced by the case of Alicante which has had a privatised control tower for the past nine years but exactly the same rates as Malaga with its publicly run service.

"All airport costs are distributed among their users and, consequently, all savings are passed on to the airport network as a whole," a Ministry of Transport source told SUR.

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