With all the hustle and bustle of activity surrounding EBACE, it is all too easy to overlook one very specialist group – the FBO’s and ground operators.
However there is no escaping from the fact that large percentage of the corporate and business jet travel experience is dictated by the activities that occur on the ground whilst embarking upon on or ending what should be an un-eventful journey.
On the Wednesday afternoon a select few of a couple of dozen attended the EBAA’s Airports and ground handling meeting. Three items where on the agenda, all potentially impacting business aviation as we see it in Europe today.
The first item on the agenda was that of slot and slot allocation. Europe has some of the most densely utilised airspace in the world. The recent volcanic ash interruptions demonstrated the very high utilisation of this airspace both for intra-European flights, transatlantic flights and intra-continental flights to the four corners of the earth. The dramatic rise of low-cost carriers has increasingly put pressure on the ATC systems and a growing number of airports. Whilst slot and slot coordination is a necessity and a practical proposition for scheduled operators, it is nothing short of a disaster for the business jet world, who’s timetables are driven by the needs of it’s premium paying customers.
Whilst at a operation level advances are being made to include business jet operations within airport facilities with slot allocation, for example by the development of XML standards to allow communication between scheduling and other operation systems, precious little has take place to address the fundamentals, in that an allocated slot is of no use to an operator if his passengers need to arrive or depart at a different time.
Discussions as to how to address this challenge where largely inconclusive, this issue is further complicated by the fact that in airports of high constraint the slots are held under long standing grandfather rights and in some cases in major European airports are valued in millions of euros, and are under the control ultimately of state owned authorities who have little time or interest in the needs of the business jet community.
The next item on the agenda was that of operational standards for FBO’s. The rapid growth of business and corporate air travel across Europe has not been matched by an equivalent growth in facilities. Some reported FBO’s are merely local ground handling agents with little or no dedicated facilities, whilst others provide all the bells and whistles; standards and expectations are very diverse.
Some criticism was made of the current system of “self verification”, where prospective FBO’s merely fill in a from and return this to the EBAA, and may without any independent verification and audit be classed as an operational FBO.
A number of leading European FBO’s where quite vocal on this and highlighted it as an issue for further attention. However a change to the current system would require any verification and audit costs to be covered, which may preclude further progress on the topic. A couple of the attendees even suggested that the national regulators would have a role to play in monitoring the proliferation of FBO’s, much to the horror of other members who could see further governmental regulation as a hindrance that would not deliver any commercial benefits.
The last topic on the agenda was the seemingly obligatory subject of any aviation get-together, that of security. On the 29th of April a few days before EBACE new pan-European legislation came into place in an attempt to harmonise security standards and requirements. Whilst the high level directive is pan-European in nature, each country has the option to provision some local derogations for certain categories of flights, such as helicopter flights, police and governmental agency flights.
What has transpired away from the corridors of power in Brussels is potentially a more fragmented system with each derogating authority at a national level interpreting the requirements upon business and corporate travel very differently. Practices of minimal screening of passengers in one country, would be deemed potentially “illegal” just a few hundred miles away.
Again as in the case with the issues surrounding slot and slot allocation, the legislation is not mindful of the practical realities of business aviation and in many cases the response to the security concerns is dispassionate to the risk. For example, it may soon be difficult technically for your VIP customer to bring on-board that bottle of wine that his host has just presented him with because it is over 100ml.
Roy
11th May
