Athens Funnelled Its Island Helicopters Into a Bottleneck – Then Closed It

NOTAM A1784/26, effective 02 June–02 September 2026, sharply throttles movements at the two heliports — Profarta (AD 3.19) and Mpota Profarta (AD 3.70) — that launch an estimated 80% of Greece’s island rotary traffic. The official justification — “increased traffic” at Athens (LGAV) — is hard to take seriously. A handful of helicopter movements an hour, flown VFR on published low-level routes, does not congest one of Europe’s busy international airports; the idea that rotary traffic must be all but grounded to relieve the airlines barely survives a first reading. With the season already open, aircraft positioned, crews rostered and bookings confirmed, the timing could hardly be worse.

What it does to the day

A “movement” is one takeoff or one landing, so a basic out-and-back burns two. Last summer the two heliports handled up to about 10 movements an hour, combined on pick days. The NOTAM caps that hourly rate — shared across both heliports — as follows:

• Sunrise–0830: 5 per hour.
• 0831–1459: 2 movements for the whole block. The busiest mid-morning departure window is effectively shut.
• 1500–1759: 3 per hour, westbound only (Damari–Ag. Thomas–Stavros).
• 1800–sunset: 3 per hour.

So a rate of ~20/day drops to 5 at dawn and just 2–3 for the rest of the day — an effective throughput cut of 60% to 90% depending on the window. Where the heliports could once turn thirty-plus movements in a couple of busy hours, the entire day now ceilings out around that same figure.

The shape compounds the squeeze. Westbound-only mid-afternoon means that, with the islands lying east, you can essentially only come home, not depart — so the few available island departures are crushed into the dawn and evening windows, colliding head-on with passenger demand for late-morning departures and sunset returns.

The procedural friction

ATC start-up sequencing in all cases means every departure burns one of those scarce movements on the controller’s clock, not the operator’s — a late passenger can cost a rotation outright. Mandatory routing adds track miles and fuel to every sortie. And making heliport operators “responsible for coordination between operators,” against a single shared hourly allowance, turns competitors into a zero-sum scramble: if one fills the dawn slots, the others get none.

The bookings already taken

AOC air-taxi operators sold this summer’s capacity months ago — to hotels, concierges, yacht charters, DMCs and direct retail — priced against an hourly throughput that has now been cut by three-quarters or more. Arriving after the season opened, it cannot be unwound cleanly. The result: physical overbooking, peak-season cancellations and refunds with ferries already full and no alternative to offer, contractual penalty exposure (is a state NOTAM force majeure? — contract by contract), expensive airframes idle through the choked midday, and severe price distortion.

Herded, then choked

This is not the first time the bill has landed on the operators. A few years ago the authorities closed every landing site in the vicinity of LGAV — a decision widely seen as a mistake — scattering operators who had been working from three or four separate locations and forcing them to consolidate onto Profarta and Mpota Profarta. Whatever the stated reasoning, the effect was to funnel an entire industry into a single bottleneck. Now that same bottleneck is being choked. The operators were herded here by one set of decisions and are being penalised by the next, with no fallback left, because the fallback was taken away years ago. As before, it is they who pay the bill.

Wider ripples

The obvious mitigation — dispersing to other mainland sites — is precisely the option the authorities removed when they shut the landing sites around LGAV. What remains is staging aircraft on the islands: more empty positioning legs, more island handling, more crew logistics, all consuming the very movements being rationed. The underlying LGAV congestion tightens slots and sequencing for fixed-wing GA across the Athens TMA too, with no break until 2 September. The one piece of sense: MEDEVAC and hospital flights are excluded, and maintenance flights remain possible with tower coordination.

A fix that fixes nothing

Less destructive options exist and are well understood: deconflicted helicopter corridors and altitude blocks that keep rotary traffic clear of the airline flows, a coordinated slot system administered across operators, dynamic restrictions tied to live LGAV demand, or tactical sequencing during peaks only. None was adopted. Instead, the network carrying 80% of island helicopter traffic is throttled by three-quarters or more, all day, all summer — a sledgehammer where a scalpel would do. That disproportion is what makes the measure look less like air-traffic management and more like a pretext.

The process around it does nothing to dispel the impression. The authorities convened two meetings with the heliport operators — the outward motions of consultation — and then produced nothing that engaged with what was raised: no alternatives explored, no mitigation offered, no calibration to actual demand. The meetings took place; the outcome was already decided. It was theater.

Bottom line

Dressed up as routine traffic management, A1784/26 cuts the island helicopter network’s throughput by three-quarters to nine-tenths at the peak of the season – a response wildly out of proportion to the problem it claims to address, reached after a consultation that engaged with none of it. For operators that leaves only triage: model the real hourly allowance, ration confirmed bookings against 5-then-2–3 movements an hour, open the hard conversations with partners, and decide what to reposition before the first weekend of June exposes the shortfall.

And that is the quiet part.

There is no real appetite anywhere to do the work of finding a solution, and no one with the standing – or the nerve – to take the decision to court.

A fragmented industry, every operator depending on the same authority for its licence and its slots, was never built to push back.

So the measure stands, the summer is written off, and the bill is paid one more time by the people who fly.