The addition next year of 10 new member states to the European Union'sexisting 15 threatens to exacerbate severe problems arising from the lack of legal uniformity across Europe, warns leading regional airline figure, Antonis Simigdalas, chief operating officer of Aegean Airlines.
Simigdalas says that carriers "face significant cost increments due to different interpretations of European law", adding that "different aviation and legal habits affect our efficiency".
Dr Laszlo Kiss, president of the European Civil Aviation Conference, says that carriers should lobby the regulators and demand more consistency. However, Simigdalas says it is a question of interpretation, rather than the regulations themselves, causing the problems.
"The question is: who is regulating the regulators?" he says, adding that there is no protection in the existing 15 member states from misinterpretation of European law: "Defending our rights takes time and costs money."
He says the year-old European Aviation Safety Agency should work with airlines to build a better system of both regulation and implementation. "I can't think of a better judge than the [airline] operators," Simigdalis says.
Meanwhile, Gusztav Szegedy, maintenance quality manager at Mal‚v Hungarian Airlines, says the quantity and quality of translation of regulations into local languages was slowing the adoption of the Joint Aviation Authorities JAR Ops1 operating rules for the new states. He also warns of "low support for the implementation process", and that some companies are implementing amendments to JARs before they pass into national law. He called for more "co-ordination support" for organisations with only national authority.
Source: Airline Business
