European Cockpit Association says European parliament is more concerned with administrative issues than with safety
The draft European Union law on pilot flight time limitations (FTL) would delay by a year a scientific review of the new law’s effectiveness in preventing dangerous fatigue, says the European Cockpit Association (ECA).
On 19 April the draft FTL law undergoes its second reading in the European Parliament with a proposal that a review of the regulation’s effectiveness within two years would cause “administrative problems” and “unjustifiable costs”, so the period should be extended to three years.
This delay has led the ECA to charge that the Parliament, which has just passed a law of “questionable usefulness” by publishing lists of banned airlines, is less concerned with safety than it is with administrative issues and with “the desire not to upset the Council of Ministers”.
The ECA has an influential ally in the independent European Transport Safety Council (ETSC), which has highlighted a number of other weaknesses in the proposed FTL legislation (EU-Ops Subpart Q), although it praises its overall intent to set maximum duty times to bring into line those European states without any laws on the subject.
The greatest loophole, says the ETSC, is that Subpart Q only applies to short-haul flights, primarily those operating within the EU itself. This means that FTL for long-haul crews crossing four or more time zones – scientifically recognised as a fatigue-creator – is left to individual national aviation authorities (NAA), points out the ETSC. This, says the council, means the EU is shying away from a critical FTL issue and abandoning the principle that all European operators shall be subject to the same regulations. Since Subpart Q also specifies that it allows NAAs with FTL regulations to reduce rest time if the new law is less stringent than their local ones, the ETSC predicts that the effect will be to put pressure on NAAs to move toward the common maxima, rather than maintaining higher standards that may be appropriate.
“There is another approach we believe should be given at least some consideration,” says the ETSC. It would make the proposed regulations “an outer circle” and “place more pressure on individual operators for the fatigue management of their own operations.”
Source: Flight International
