# European Union Airport question

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/european-union-airport-question/271072>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [October 25, 2004, 5:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/european-union-airport-question/271072 "2004-10-25T17:00:49Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Dog80](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/6bbea6/32.png) [@Dog80](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dog80)\
**Post date:** [October 25, 2004, 5:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/european-union-airport-question/271072/1 "2004-10-25T17:00:49Z")

</div>

A friend of mine says that flight data from all airports within the EU are sent to some headquarters in Brussels that process this data (presumably in real time). Ultimately, the permission to take-off or land for each individual aircraft comes from Brussels.

Is that true?

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![GorillaMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/50afbb/32.png) [@GorillaMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GorillaMan)\
**Post date:** [October 25, 2004, 6:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/european-union-airport-question/271072/2 "2004-10-25T18:42:14Z")

</div>

Air traffic control isn’t unified across Europe. The British system is [NATS](http://www.nats.co.uk/).

However, there’s necessarily a lot of co-operation between ATC systems, and it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a central collation of such data. But Brussels has no authority over permission to land at Heathrow.