Rather late in the day, the US flightcrew training industry has woken up to the fact that Europe is preventing it from taking a direct slice of the Continent's massive new unified market, and it is crying foul.
A battle is about to be joined in which politics is going to play a much larger part than the quality of flying training.
The USA didn't take a great deal of interest in pursuing the European pilot training market before the new Joint Aviation Requirements Flight Crew Licensing (JARFCL) was drawn up.
Before JAR FCL was adopted, each European nation had its own pilot training syllabus and licence standards. To run a different syllabus for each of these national licences was simply not feasible for any US flying training organisation (FTO), however. Now that JAR FCL has standardised the licence requirements and training syllabus for all the Joint Aviation Authorities members, the US FTOs are looking at a market far bigger than the European Union: 27 instead of 15 countries.
Now the bad news - for the USA. As JAR FCL stands, an FTO will not be approved to train pilots for a European licence unless its registered office and main place of business are in a JAA member state. A second paragraph requiring majority ownership by European interests has just been put up for amendment. The US Federal Aviation Administration is pleading that the latter rule flies in the face of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Fair enough. It would be thoroughly impractical to police the ownership anyway.
Of course, the USA's FTOs have been assured for years - and this will not change - of winning a large part of most European student pilots' training budgets because airborne time is far cheaper in the USA. Apart from the self-sponsored European students who will continue to flock there for their basic training, European FTOs will carry on sending their trainees to US schools for the first 70-100h flying instruction. This is simply because they cannot compete with an industry which pays low fuel taxes, faces no landing fees, doesn't charge value added tax, and can employ cheaper instructors because the qualifications required are lower.
There is therefore a slightly pantomime quality about the letter just presented to FAA Administrator Jane Garvey by the US National Air Transport Association (NATA) which calls for her "-to support and defend US aviation businesses against the enforcement of devastating news[JAA] rules". The FAA has always ruled that it will not accept students for FAA Airman Certificates unless training is conducted in US territory.
Choose your own cliché to describe the FAA/NATA solution: but it does not represent "a level playing field" , nor is it in the spirit of "open skies".
First class pilots can be produced by the systems in place on either side of the Atlantic, so pilot quality is not the issue. The FAA's evocation of GATT makes it clear that this argument is about politics, and neither side will listen to the other until the politics have been sorted out.
US FTOs are going to get as much business as they ever did from Europe anyway. Ironically, even if the FAA dropped its insistence on US pilots being trained in their own country, they would still choose to be trained there because European FTOs could not compete on price, and they know it.
According to European calculations, however, when the new JAR FCLs become fully implemented in 1999, US FTOs would win about 40% more business if there were no clause stating that approved FTOs must locate some of their operations east of the Atlantic. Europe's FTOs would lose an estimated $94.2 million a year, they have calculated.
Serious politics has not yet entered the fray. It will do, however, when JAR FCL is taken under the European Commission's wing and made a European Union law. The JAA's considerations in drawing up JAR FCL were concerned with the quality and skills they want future European commercial pilots to have. When the European Commission takes over, all the political and social considerations will be injected. Just as the USA wants to have a healthy indigenous pilot training industry, so does Europe.
Source: Flight International
