Brussels, 04/06/2013 (Agence Europe) - The European transport commissioner, Siim Kallas, is expected to present his new proposal of the European Single Sky next week. The new version is a legislative tweaking, “2+”.
European Single Sky, a major project for aviation in Europe, is becoming bogged down, despite the advantages that it would bring in terms of punctuality, environment and, quite simply, costs. In order to put things straight, the commission had spoken in January this year (see EUROPE 10769) of the preparations for a series of measures to correct the errors of the second Single Sky package presented in 2009. The initiative known as Single Sky 2+ should mean that there will be no need to go all the way back to the beginning in a third package so that solutions can be found to ongoing problems without going back to the basics of Single Sky.
A source familiar with the dossier in question expects the initiative to be presented in Strasbourg early next week to involve the aviation industry more, especially with regard to the performance system (which member states are not keen on). This is, moreover, a clearly stated request made by the airline companies early in the year (see EUROPE 10786). It would also be a matter of exerting peer pressure between member states in order to finalise the setting in place of the nine functional airspace blacks (FABs). Most of them, however, only exist on paper.
Although, at first sight, a fringe of the airline industry could be satisfied with the new Single Sky 2+, it might fear that these proposals will once more be dismantled by European transport ministers at a later date. The air sector industry would have preferred to have a complete overhaul of the legislation to be set in place instead of making do with rebalancing, the same source intimates. (MD/transl.jl)