Brussels, 22/01/2013 (Agence Europe) - Commissioner Kallas has warned against the risk of having to create a third Single European Sky (SES) package under the next Commission if the second package's delays and failings are not put right in the near future. The package being prepared, the Single European Sky 2+, should contribute to this, he said.
Far from a Single European airspace. European Transport Commissioner Siim Kallas took stock of the implementation of the Single European Sky on Monday 21 January during a hearing at the European Economic and Social Committee. He pointed out that the second Single European Sky package had been tabled in 2009 but that “today, we are a long way from creating a single European airspace”. He deplored the fact that there are still a large number of delays (17.9 million minutes in 2011), that the nine functional airspace blocks are running seriously late (deadline 4 December last), and that the performance schemes are not delivering. Also, he stressed the fact that national supervisory authorities are under-funded, under-staffed and do not have sufficiently independent expertise, being dangerously close to those that they are supposed to oversee.
Getting one's own house in order. Kallas admits that there is no crisis yet and that, at present, air traffic in Europe is stable, even stagnating. However, he says the business is very much a cyclical one with its ups and downs and that, consequently, “if we are not ready to cope with the likely rise in traffic in the years ahead, then the future effect of a demand crisis is multiplied”. This largely makes it necessary for the European side to put its “own house in order”, he said. While the provisions of the Single European Sky 1 and 2 are still valid, he went on, there are persistent problems to be resolved, to be remedied by the Single European Sky package 2+. Kallas states that this legislative fine-tuning should be published “soon”. “If we do not get on with preparing SES 2+ in the short time left to this Commission, then the next Commission may - or very likely, will - find itself working on a SES 3 package. If we do not pave the way now and prepare for the pick-up in demand, we will find ourselves in a crisis situation that we could - and should - have avoided”. (MD/transl.jl)