This is the second of a two-part interview with Michael Ambrose, director general of the European Regions Airline Association (ERA) (see C/R News, Jan. 27, 2003). Ambrose talked with C/R News Editor Douglas Nelms about safety reporting legislation and other issues affecting European regional carriers this year.

C/R News: Safety is an issue that is always of concern, regardless of which side of the Atlantic one is on. But for Europe, are there any specific safety issues currently at the forefront that will impact regionals?

Ambrose: The most important piece of safety legislation that the [European] Commission has come up with was an excellent proposal to introduce "no penalty reporting" for operating crews and to protect the data that was reported. Regrettably, this superb proposal was emasculated by the Council of Ministers when they took out those two important points. We all know that we, as an industry and with the help of regulators and governments worldwide, have been leaders in air safety. We have had better designs, better research, better simulation, better training, better testing, better maintenance, better knowledge of the environment in which we operate. There is no single answer - it's been a collective solution to improve air safety. But we are now down to the point where human error is a much higher percentage of the incidents and accidents that we do have. If you really want to penetrate that, then we must have legislation that supports the sharing of information and the open distribution of experiences rather than have the situation as it exists in Europe at the moment. Some ERA members have even admitted that they will hide safety information that they have if one of their aviation administrators enters the building. That is simply unacceptable.

We should be creating an environment in which, first of all, we don't reinvent the wheel. We all need to learn from each other. We've had a series of incidents in Europe this year that have raised a number of questions. That is a superb piece of legislation and we want to see it put back into the full authority state that it was in when it was first published.

The second major issue that seems to be on going is the debate with Europe, and now within ICAO [International Civil Aviation Organization], with respect to duty time and rest regulations for flying crew. The European Commission has been trying to harmonize that since 1989. We have finally achieved a proposal that has gone through the European Parliament and is now awaiting consideration by the Council of Ministers. But what do we find at the same time? ICAO is looking at the problem and is being lobbied heavily by the pilots. I do not blame any employee group for arguing for better terms and conditions for itself, provided that the employers can afford it--but we've all seen what's happened to United recently.

We don't have a problem from a flight crew duty time and rest regulation viewpoint. Where I do have some problems is that today the current duty and rest regulations are such that acceptable levels of safety are being achieved. So pilots using safety to argue for fewer and fewer hours, or augmentation in the cockpit, have failed to prove the safety case. They are trying to prove an industrial case, and I think it is wrong to use safety as an industrial case. You might remember instances where we have had safety at stake, such as DC-10s being grounded, 737 rudders being thoroughly investigated, Tridents being grounded because cracks were found in the wingtips. We have always shown a willingness to take the decision ourselves to ground airplanes and waited for the regulators to catch up. So the industry is not scared of taking safety on the nose if it needs to. The Commission has been arguing this [rest and duty time issue] since 1989, coming up on 14 years now. If we really had a safety problem, would they have allowed it to drag on for 14 years? No way.

C/R News: On the subject of safety, what is the latest status of the creation of a European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA)?

Ambrose: We expect to see that in place this year and to start its work. It is important to Europe, and the Commission has done a very good job in getting that through. The concept is excellent. What we have to ensure is that it does not result in yet another layer of bureaucracy and costs. It will be good for Europe in that it will provide an international alternative on a worldwide basis that might be more politically acceptable than the Federal Aviation Administration [FAA]. It will also act as a good tool for harmonizing our operating conditions across Europe. But we as the operators would like to see state aviation regulators saying they don't have to repeat all of these duplicated activities -- duplication within the agency itself and the agency failing to grasp the opportunities for economies of scale. One example would perhaps be pilot licensing. Each state has at the moment a pilot licensing office, a database, etc. In the modern age, why couldn't that be done centrally with computer modem access through a central data base and perhaps a handful of licensing people in each national authority with the bulk of the work being centralized. In other words, we need to go through the same mental discipline that any commercial business would go through if it saw that in two locations within the same continent it was doing the same thing. It would look for ways to reduce its aggregate costs.

Ultimately, EASA would take over everything that the JAA [Joint Aviation Authorities] does. However, the question then is what do you do during the interim period when the JAA still exists but while a very large and significant part of its membership is compelled to work under EASA. Even if you said that we would pick up the existing member states plus the applicant member states to the European Union, plus those such as Norway and Sweden who have agreed to harmonize their safety regulations, you still have a number of JAA states that don't fit into any of those categories, such as Romania or some of the [former Soviet Union] states that are part of JAA but don't fit into the European Union. What is the JAA going to do, what is the relationship between JAA and EASA going to be? There are some very difficult questions that we face this year.

C/R News: In the United States, the biggest competitor a regional faces is often the automobile. In Europe it's more often the train. Is that competition getting more intense; and if so, what is driving it?

Ambrose: For that question you have to accept that Britain is a third-world nation with fourth-world train service. Our offices are about 20 miles from London's Waterloo station. If we were to go and get on the train this afternoon, there is something like a 75 percent probability that the train would be filthy on both the outside and inside and an equal probability that it would not be running on time. It is a fourth-world service. Now, not all of our trains are like that, but many are, and it's from decades of under investment and mismanagement. However, in continental Europe, the train services are generally very, very good. That is in part because of the subsidies that are provided to the rail services and how they allow the trains to compete totally unfairly with whatever price the airlines chose to set. If we try to bring down our airfares, the railroads, which are grossly subsidized, do the same thing. I am not a subscriber to the George Orwell Animal Farm philosophy that some animals are more equal than others, but if we are going to espouse within the European Union the fundamental principles of fair and equal competition, then it is absolutely unacceptable that the railways get such a high subsidy. If you look at the level of subsidies that were reported by the Commission in the spring of last year, [there was] about 87 billion euros ($92.7 billion) per annum going to support for all industries including agriculture. Of that 87 billion, 32.2 billion euros ($34.3 billion) went to transportation, and of those 32.2 billion euros, 32.1 billion ($34.1 billion) went to rail. That left the other 0.1 billion euros ($110 million) to be divided up among air, road and shipping. That was the average per year for the three-year period 1999 through 2001.

C/R News: The European Air Traffic Control (ATC) situation has long been a problem because of overcrowded skies and multi-jurisdictional bureaucracy. The growing number of RJs competing for airspace with the larger carriers' jetliners certainly isn't going to help the situation. To what extent does the ERA get involved with the problems of the ATC system in Europe?

Ambrose: We are very much involved. It is a growing problem. Right up until 1997, we had a reasonably acceptable level of performance, with just some complaints about user fees. From 1997 we had a significant growth rate that carried through until 2000. That almost brought the system to a grinding halt. The Air Traffic Service Organization, the national ATC organization in the core area of Europe, simply could not provide the capacity that was needed. Everything goes through the core area, so you had this corridor going from London southeast through Paris and right down to Zurich and Geneva, cutting through Germany and even touching the Northern Italian area. That core area was densely packed and ATC could not provide the capacity. Punctuality went down the tubes to the point where we almost did not have a credible industry because of the level of delays. There was the equivalent of something like 230 aircraft grounded every day.

Since then, we have seen a significant improvement in ATC capacity arising from investments from the air traffic service suppliers and particularly by the operators themselves. Reduced vertical separation has brought about a bit of the additional capacity, and we are at the point now where we are achieving the delay performance level that we had in 1997, in spite of the fact that traffic is now about 20 percent higher, so air traffic service providers in Europe have achieved a significant improvement in their performance from appropriate investments and with the airlines making investments in the cockpits. What we have to do now is first of all make sure that nobody feels that we can sit back and say "that's it, we've achieved a better performance," because we still do not have the capacity for future growth that we need. And once you allow an investment stream to dry up, or get terminated, getting it restarted is very difficult. Secondly we have to make sure that investments and cost control by the air traffic service providers is more cost effective. Some providers, such as the Netherlands, have been very, very austere and done their best to match the industry in terms of economic restraint. Other providers have taken the view that they will get paid anyway, so they don't have to take cost control all that seriously. So user fees remain a major problem. We have to get a better level of service charge for the services that we use.

The last issue, and the key to the whole thing really, is the good work that the Commission has done in hammering through the Council of Ministers its proposal for a single European sky. Those proposals are based on the air space users proposals put to the Commission about 10 years ago. But it's a sad commentary that there hasn't been a political climate with a willingness to change until last year when the Commission put its proposals forward. Those excellent proposals now have to be implemented and be void of any sovereign interest. And when you have worked in the international arena that we have in Europe, you will know that while you have, say 15 states, in one community, that probably means you have something like 225 different opinions that come out of those 15 states. So we have to make sure that we are optimizing European skies on the basis of what is good for Europe, not what is good for a particular nation. That means some states will have to accept that they can't have it all their own way. They might have to cede some of their sovereign rights and their national aspirations.

(Contact: Michael Ambrose, ERA, telephone: 44-1276-856495, e-mail: Michael.Ambrose@era.org)