CAA chief says European agency is not delivering value
The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) is taking too long to become the effective organisation that the European Union's national aviation authorities (NAA) hoped it would be, says the UK Civil Aviation Authority chairman Sir Roy McNulty.
Although EASA came into being in October 2003, McNulty says it has been unable to attract sufficient technical experts to its staff, has not secured the funding it requires to do its job, and has failed to set up working agreements with the NAAs to employ their expertise on EASA tasks.
Using a speech to the Institute of Economic Affairs last week in London to give the CAA's views on several European aviation agencies and programmes, McNulty said EASA "has the potential to be one of the biggest and most beneficial changes to civil aviation safety regulation in Europe for many years".
But he says it will continue to "stutter along" unless the NAAs work to "get their act together". The lack of expert technical staff, while particularly acute at EASA, is a problem the NAAs also face, says McNulty, because they are losing many to industry. The EASA system theoretically works using a core of technical experts and administrators at its Cologne, Germany base, while working with the NAAs to supplement its own expertise and carry out its work in their own regions. The trouble is, says McNulty, that the necessary agreements for EASA to work with the NAAs do not yet exist, and the funding for EASA - and other EU devolved agencies - is supposed to be in place by January, but the prospects "do not look good".
The UK CAA is happy in principle to carry out EASA work, says McNulty, "but not to subsidise it or have industry do so" via the CAA's own charges. Meanwhile, UK industry is complaining about EASA charges which are higher than the CAA's, McNulty says, adding: "And they [industry] told us we were expensive."
McNulty's overall theme was the effectiveness and efficiency of European agencies in serving the "users", the airlines. He believes individual air navigation service providers are effective monopolies that had too little incentive to deliver value and he warns the airlines that environmental incentives are inevitable. The CAA, he says, "welcomes the polluter pays principle" set out by the UK government.
DAVID LEARMOUNT / LONDON
Source: Flight International
