The UK Civil Aviation Authority has become the first agency in Europe to indicate how it intends to carry out checks to license air navigation service providers (ANSP). Licensing of European ANSPs will be law by the end of this year – even though the final draft of the rules does not yet exist – and compliance will have to be proven within the following 12 months.
The licence standards have requirements that do not exist under present rules, particularly the need to prove economic, security and quality control competence. Once an ANSP has a European licence, it can offer its services anywhere in the continent. But licensing alone is not enough: before providing a service, an ANSP must be designated as the provider within a certain area. Under the Single European Sky strategy, the area may be geographically multinational, which is one of the reasons Eurocontrol and the EC require all ANSPs to be licensed to meet the same minimum standards.
One of the CAA’s objectives in publishing compliance guidelines, it says, is to minimise the cost to industry of achieving licensed status. It estimates the total cost to UK industry at £1.1 million ($2 million), mostly to the major ANSP National Air Traffic Services (NATS), but also the providers of meteorological services, aviation information services and independent contractors providing airport air traffic control. The CAA implies it believes UK ANSPs meet most of the criteria for licensing, and says its preferred method of checking this will be “a risk-based approach commensurate with the type and level of service provided by an ANSP”. This will be carried out by circulating “compliance questionnaires”, followed up if needed by audit.
DAVID LEARMOUNT/LONDON
Source: Flight International
