COMMENT: Who Are Flying With?
It could be as soon as today (Monday 29 August) that France publishes a list of airlines and countries with poor air safety records and banned from French operations. Switzerland follows on Thursday and amongst other European countries Belgium is known to be considering such a policy. This comes after a spate of air crashes and concern by the public that they are being kept in the dark over safety. At present there are no common EU guidelines on aircraft grounding matters. It is up to the individual country. In the UK the Department for Transport publishes such a blacklist.
The French are also planning to introduce rules to name the carrier which actually operates a service. And it is in this area that once again the airlines might finish up arguing with the European law makers who are also taking an interest. All carriers bring in third party operators due to technical and operational problems, on occasion at very short notice. With holiday charter flights it can also be very difficult to predict the actual carrier as brochures are produced sometimes as much as two years ahead of the actual flight. By then the published airline can be out of business. In the UK fully CAA approved specialist airlines, such as European Aviation Air Charter, Titan Airways and now Air Atlantique (see below), have thrived on helping out (a process with the laborious technical name ACMI) other more well known carriers with aircraft when, for all sorts of reasons, there is a requirement. It can be for a single flight, or for a planned maintenance session. For the most part gone are the days when airlines kept aircraft for purely standby reasons. It is just too expensive. Far cheaper to hire in. Britain is not the only country to operate these ACMI carriers. There are also several highly competent European examples.
Any new rules need thinking out very carefully before they are implemented or even formally discussed. With the takeover of the booking systems by the Internet and its now common use it may well be that the airline can get one step ahead of the legislators by announcing any change of actual operator on the web. The onus would then be on the passenger to check. Links could be provided to the website of the carrier concerned. The onus would then be on the traveller to see whom he is actually flying with. In an age of so-called transparency nobody could accuse an airline of a cover up when it not the advertised carrier who is operating the flight.