David Learmount, a local resident, is one of the world's leading authorities on the aviation industry. He agreed to write a blog post for us on the impact of Brexit on the British Aviation industry.
David Learmount/Consulting Editor, FlightGlobal.com
The UK airline industry has definitely been affected by Brexit, but much less than other types of business because it is a service industry, and because the EU already had a fairly relaxed attitude to competition from third countries’ airlines anyway.
So passengers won’t notice much of a Brexit difference on board airliners, but they will notice changes in ancillary travel facets, like permissible duty free goods, the use of different customs channels, the banishment of UK citizens from the quick EU passport checking queues to the longer ones shared with Americans and all the other non-EU nationalities. Oh yes, and goodbye to the EU rules protecting passenger rights to recompense by the airlines for airline delays and cancellations.
But the changes that do exist are felt deeply by the airlines, in the arena of legal complexity and bureaucracy. One of the EU agencies which Theresa May’s government said we would definitely stay in is the EU Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), which is an agency of the European Commission (EC). But the Johnson government’s more ideologically-driven decision was that we’d leave it completely. Our own Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), which previously worked within agreed EU standards – on the creation of which the CAA was acknowledged as the most influential single aviation authority in Europe – is now on its own again, influencing no-one, and is having to hire staff to carry out the safety policy oversight work which EASA used to provide. UK pilot licences used to be EASA-approved. Now they are not, although UK-based pilot training schools can apply for EASA approval to train UK pilots to EASA standards and gain an EASA licence. But because UK nationals no longer have freedom of movement and employment, it is no longer easy for a British pilot to work for an EU airline, or vice versa.
Airlines and aircraft registered in the UK are now, theoretically, subject only to the regulation of the CAA. But in order for UK aircraft and airlines to be allowed to fly into EU countries, the UK has to negotiate a bilateral aviation agreement with the EU. The UK cannot have bilateral aviation agreements with individual EU member states as the Johnson government would like, because they have all agreed to EU standards, are members of EASA, and allow the EC to negotiate bilaterals on their behalf. In their own countries, EU member states permit EASA to oversee their operating rules and safety standards, working closely with their own national aviation authorities, which is what our CAA used to do.
The advantages of EASA (and its predecessor the Joint Aviation Authorities) to European aviation have been massive over the last forty years. The continent’s aviation industry has moved from having different regulations and standards in every single state, to agreeing among themselves a common set of standards. This has caused aviation to become less legally complex, aircraft and their engines to be designed to common safety standards, allowed operating practices in EU airspace to be unified, and the same for air traffic control. To take an example of pre-EU aviation: back in the 1960s Boeing would design its ubiquitous 737 for America, and when European nations ordered 737s Boeing had to make a bespoke 737 for each separate state to comply with the different national airworthiness requirements. When EASA came into being, it had the clout to ensure that Boeing designed its aircraft not just with its own domestic market in mind, but to meet EU standards. The result was that EASA and the US Federal Aviation Administration agreed, whenever either of them made new rules, that they would consult with each other to harmonise them, and mutually accept each other’s standards.
International aviation, like shipping, has to have agreed global standards for it to work. These standards, known as “standards and recommended practices” (SARPS), are agreed at - and overseen by - a Montreal-based United Nations agency called the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO). Airlines do not sign up to these standards, States do, and with those signatures the States agree to police their own airlines according to the SARPS. The UK, and the EU, both abide by the vast majority of SARPS, and where they do not, they “file a difference” with ICAO.
In order to make international law work in a safety-critical industry like aviation, lines of legal accountability have to be clear. That means that airline ownership and control has to be clear, and although the airline industry is much more deregulated than it used to be, the requirement to be able to identify airline majority ownership - and to apply to that ownership to nationality - is still very much there, and likely to remain so.
Think about how legally complicated that can be, since Brexit, for an airline like British Airways, a member of the International Airlines Group (IAG). IAG is headquartered in Spain, its shares are listed on the London and Madrid stock exchanges, and it consists of airlines owned and registered in Spain, Ireland, France and the UK.
Ryanair is fine, because although its UK operations are its biggest regional business, it is owned and registered in Ireland, and has nearly seventy bases all over Europe and the EU where it bases aircraft and crews, and they operate like a mass of mini-airlines from hubs in the countries they are based in. The EU makes this easy, and it has played a massive part in making air travel as cheap as it is now.
EasyJet was originally UK owned and registered, but now it has devolved its ownership more widely within the EU and Switzerland to sidestep the disadvantages Brexit brings.
Meanwhile in 2021, as is completely clear to anyone wanting a summer holiday in Europe or elsewhere, the airline industry has been brought to its knees by Covid-19, and by the international personal travel restrictions that go with it. This is entirely separate from Brexit, but the additional bureaucracy that arrived on the airlines’ doorstep on 1 January 2021 has not exactly helped them while they are at their lowest ebb.
ENDS
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