On 27 September the European Commission (EC) College of Commissioners meets in Brussels. One of the items on a busy agenda is the formation of the proposed European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). This is an issue which must not be dumped in the "too difficult" tray.
At a time when Europe's aerospace industry is rapidly consolidating into massive multi-national corporations like EADS (European Aeronautics Defence and Space), and when consortia like Airbus Industrie are expanding and developing their product range at a formidable rate, the lack of a central airworthiness authority to certificate these international (but primarily European) products is an illogical and inefficient state of affairs. One effect will be that the resources of some individual countries' aviation authorities will be completely swamped while others have little to do. The clearest example is France's DGAC, the lead certificating authority for Airbus Industrie products.
Airbus itself has warned that - particularly with the A3XX posing unprecedented airworthiness challenges - the rate at which new or upgraded aircraft models can be developed and delivered to the market will be limited by the certification agency's resources rather than by the manufacturer's capacity.
In the USA, the Federal Aviation Administration's resources are overstretched by the awesome output of the US industry. But at least the USA does not have a fragmented system of safety agencies which duplicate each others' tasks many times over, and where each puts its own interpretation on the harmonised Joint Aviation Authorities regulations.
EASA is not new to the Commissioners. Its formation was politically approved by the EU Council of Ministers in 1998, but that was the easy bit. Then it was just a concept. By March this year the EC had drawn up a blueprint for the new agency, and although the Council of Ministers waved the process onward, it became clear that the organisation would have to start by being purely an EU body, with non-EU members of the JAA and the European Civil Aviation Conference countries joining when they were constitutionally ready to do so.
So this week the Commissioners have the task of advancing the arrangements for EASA's constitutional formation by overcoming the endemic resistance of nations, even within the EU, to giving up any national sovereignty. They must not postpone decisionmaking on EASA. The European aerospace industry needs it now. The will is there, the Council of Ministers has endorsed the concept at every stage, so it is the Commissioners' job to chart the way.
Source: Flight International
