December 5 (SeeNews) - Bosnia's air navigation services agency, BHANSA, said that it has taken control of air traffic in the country's entire airspace for the first time.
"This event [...] means that the entire sky of Bosnia and Herzegovina will no longer be controlled from its neighboring countries, but from Bosnia and Herzegovina itself," BHANSA said in a statement on Wednesday.
The transfer of air traffic control from neighbouring Serbia and Croatia took place after midnight on December 4 and in the early hours of December 5.
So far, BHANSA has been providing services up to the flight level 325, or 10,000 meters, where only 200 aircraft are flying, which is 20% of air traffic over Bosnia, the head of the agency, Davorin Primorac, said in the statement.
He added that after taking over control of air traffic in its entire airspace, Bosnia will now start providing services to up to 1,600 aircraft overflights across its sky.
In the past, Serbia's Belgrade and Croatia’s Zagreb used to be the airspace control centres within the borders of the former Yugoslavia but each independent country that emerged after the breakup of the Yugoslav federation in the 1990s was supposed to establish its own area of air traffic control. In Bosnia, however, the process of establishing a national control centre has been delayed several times and the Balkan country managed to establish full control of air traffic over its territory 25 years after gaining its independence.