No Obligation to Brexit by Roger Felber

Author:Roger Felber [Felber, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786234575
Publisher: Grosvenor House Publishing
Published: 2019-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

AIR TRANSPORT

Aviation would be a key matter if Brexit should happen, which appears through lack of any serious or honest public information that it has been almost forgotten about. Is this possible?

The EU’s 28 nations are considered as a single aviation market. In the aviation industry the rights to fly between nations are negotiated government to government. In years gone by Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) negotiated all airline agreements between the UK and all countries in the world where we had air links. Very often this was on an equality basis. In other words, an agreement between Britain and say Australia would permit a certain number of flights per day, often being an equal number of flights by airlines of each of the countries; so in those days in this example, Qantas and British Airways.

There were a myriad of such agreements and for more than sixty years prior to joining the EU, Britain and the other European countries each had their own equivalent of the CAA negotiating air transport agreements with the rest of the world. This was a substantial ongoing operation as new routes were opened.

The 2005 “EU roadmap” policy brought control of bilateral agreements between EU nations and the rest of the world to Brussels and since that time more than 1,000 bilateral agreements with 122 countries have been negotiated by the EU and brought into conformity with a uniform aviation policy managed very effectively in Brussels. The CAA in Britain and their counterparts in other EU member states have therefore been relieved of this responsibility for many years.

So, whilst we have a twenty one months transition agreement with the EU, we do not have any transition period with third countries with which the EU has air agreements – nor trading agreements. And if the 29th March 2019 were tomorrow, without having evoked Article 50, British airlines would have no rights to fly to any non-EU country nor vice versa. And our rights to and from EU countries would be subject to the limitations of the transition period.

At the time of writing, Britain has no bilateral agreements in place with any countries to start commercial air service operations on 30th March 2019. However Britain could, from a legal standpoint, enter into conditional agreements with many countries, the conditionality being the UK’s departure from the EU.

In October 2017 Chris Grayling Transport Minister, said the UK was at an advanced stage of negotiating a post Brexit agreement with the USA so British Airways and others would have flying rights to the USA on March 30th 2019. What he said was incorrect for we were at that time not even close to the starting line with the USA. As Minister in charge of transport he should have known the position, so to give him the benefit of the doubt on honesty, he was either misinformed or just didn’t understand.

Then in January 2018 there was a secret meeting in London. The Americans were proposing terms which were impossible for us to abide by, particularly concerning the substantial foreign ownership of British airlines.

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