Member States took stock, on Thursday 14 July at a meeting of the EU Council’s Working Party on Aviation, of the main sticking points in the interinstitutional negotiations (‘trilogues’) on the ability of the European Aviation Safety Agency to act as a Performance Review Body for the Single European Sky, as well as the role of national supervisory authorities.
Despite several technical meetings under the French Presidency of the EU Council, some sticking points remain since the last trilogue, which took place on 22 November 2021.
In detail, the question of the independence of national supervisory authorities still needs to be settled. The EU Council advocates for national supervisory authorities to be functionally independent of air navigation service providers, without being required to be legally independent. The Parliament, for its part, wants to see these two entities legally separate, with their own budgets.
In addition, Member States would like to be able to organise and merge the functions of economic and safety supervision in the same administrative entity. The Parliament, which insists on strict independence requirements, could agree to this if these requirements are met and subject to approval by the European Commission.
Furthermore, the positions of the two parties - “ generally very different”, according to the Czech Presidency of the EU Council - are also opposed on the certification of air navigation service providers.
On the EU Council side, a single certificate could be issued subject to a positive opinion from the supervisory authority on “financial robustness, liability and insurance cover”. The supervisory authority would be responsible for the advice provided. For the European Parliament, the economic and the safety part of the certificate should be dealt with through two separate procedures and the European Commission should be empowered to adopt delegated acts to amend the list of conditions to which a certificate may be subject to.
The representation of Member States in the Single European Sky Performance Review Body is also a stumbling block. On this point, the EU Council proposes two options. The latter, relying on a regulatory board and a board of appeal composed solely of representatives of national authorities, simply differ from each other in terms of the distribution of staff in the two bodies.
The Parliament claims that while the regulatory board should be made up of nine national supervisory authorities from the Member States, the board of appeal should be composed of “six members selected from current or former senior managers of national supervisory authorities, competition authorities or other EU or national institutions with relevant experience in the aviation sector”.
During the Czech Republic’s 6 months at the helm of the EU Council, part of the work is also expected to be devoted to the charging system and the liberalisation of air navigation service provision.
See the document: https://aeur.eu/f/2n6 (Original version in French by Thomas Mangin)