ICAO and IATA are jointly developing new guidelines and regulations that limit unrestricted compensation to passengers who suffer delayed flights.
The spur to these changes was the Icelandic ash cloud of 2010. The Association of European Airlines estimates that it cost its member airlines €170 million ($233 million), the bulk of which was from providing due care and assistance to the multitude of passengers stranded during the airspace closures.
Chaitan Jain, assistant director of government and industry affairs at IATA, says revisions to the draconian European passenger rights – EU Regulation 261/2004 – were already under way, but the cloud did help highlight how severe they were.
“It really brought attention to the issue and demonstrated that such situations are simply unsustainable,” he says. “Even the legislators in the European Commission recognised they had gone too far by requiring airlines to provide open-ended support in situations out of their control.”
The revision process is ongoing, but there is unlikely to be any significant development until 2015 at the earliest.
Meanwhile, ICAO’s assembly developed its own global core principles for passenger care and protection in late 2013. At the end of May 2014, the organisation’s air transport regulatory panel will meet to start developing those principles into practice.
IATA will be attending the meeting to advise the members on the aviation industry’s own principles developed last year at the IATA AGM in Cape Town. Jain says this is a golden opportunity to create an aligned set of global standards that protect passengers while not hobbling the airlines.
“Our own core principles are consistent with international law, but also strike a balance between basic protection for passengers and allowing airlines the flexibility to differentiate themselves in the marketplace, and so ensure their competitiveness. Getting IATA and ICAO principles aligned will create better compliance in the future, for the benefit of the industry and the passengers as well,” he says.
The timing is right, as the 60 national and regional regulatory regimes already in place are a mess, and more companies are developing their own regulations to further confuse the issue.
“All the regimes overlap into a very confusing web,” says Jain. “In some cases, as many as two or three different national or regional regimes can apply to any one situation. What makes it difficult to create harmonised global standards is that countries have very different regulatory philosophies.
“For example, Singapore and Australia believe, as we do, that only the power of the market should compel airlines to provide value-added service to customer. That allows airlines to provide a service they can maintain and if the customers do not want that because it does not meet their expectations, they are free to go elsewhere.
“The Europeans and certain South American countries believe the opposite: that they have to legislate to protect passengers. This is made worse when governments have a knee-jerk reaction to specific incidents that affect the public, such as bad weather causing delays on the tarmac.”
It remains to be seen how quickly the ICAO discussions will bear fruit, but Jain is optimistic that the foundations are in place for effective development of a common standard.
“It’s hard to give a timeframe of how long it will take, but the fact that these discussions are going on is cause for optimism,” Jain says. “There is recognition of the problem and a willingness to tackle it but, as always, the devil is the details.”
Source: Flight Daily News
