PARIS — The European Commission on Thursday is expected to propose a new market-based system for allocating takeoff and landing slots at airports to help increase efficiency and reduce travel delays.
The draft legislation also calls for stricter rules for the use of existing airport slots, requiring airlines to use at least 85 percent of their allocated positions in a given year — up from 80 percent — or risk forfeiting their unused capacity to other airlines.
The latest proposal does not include an expected provision to enable the auctioning of new airport slots, a plan that had been strongly opposed by airlines.
According to Siim Kallas, the European Union’s commissioner for transport, the proposed measures on slots would allow airports across the union’s 27 member states to handle 24 million more passengers a year by 2025, generating 5 billion euros (about $6.67 billion) in additional economic activity and creating up to 62,000 jobs.
“Europe’s airports are facing a capacity crunch,” Mr. Kallas said in remarks prepared before the official announcement of the proposals at midday Thursday in Brussels. “If business and the traveling public are to take best advantage of the air network, we have to act now.”
Current European Union law does not expressly allow for the trading of airport slots among airlines, and so far Britain is the only member state where a secondary market has developed. Elsewhere, slots have tended to change hands informally, with terms negotiated privately.
The commission argues that the existing system is inefficient and hinders competition among airlines. By creating a market that would assign a financial value to slots, Brussels hopes to create incentives for airlines to sell underused slots to other carriers that could make better use of the capacity.
Five European airports are already operating at or near full capacity: Heathrow and Gatwick near London; Frankfurt and Düsseldorf in Germany and Linate airport in Milan. According to the commission, that number could nearly quadruple by 2030 — and include major hubs like Charles de Gaulle in Paris — if air traffic continues to grow at its current pace of 4 percent to 5 percent a year.
“The resulting congestion could mean delays for half of all flights across the network,” Mr. Kallas said.
The commission backed down from proposing that new airport capacity be allocated by auction. Currently, when an airport expands, additional takeoff and landing slots are allocated by an independent coordinator, which sets aside 50 percent of them for new entrants. The other 50 percent goes to incumbent airlines on a first-come-first-served basis.
The airline industry has successfully fought against slot auctions in the past, arguing that they amount to a tax on the industry, because airlines do not now pay for new slots. A similar plan to auction slots at Kennedy and La Guardia airports in New York and Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey was abandoned in 2009 because of opposition from airlines and the airports.
Airlines have generally supported the creation of a secondary market for slots, as well as penalties for airlines that hold on to slots that they do not use. But they are critical of the so-called use-it-or-lose-it approach, which they say creates perverse incentives that are harmful to the environment.
“Increasing the threshold to 85 percent will only encourage airlines to fly empty planes to preserve their slots,” Tony Tyler, secretary general of the International Air Transport Association, an airline lobby group, said at briefing in Paris last month.
The draft legislation also includes measures aimed at increasing competition among providers of baggage handling and other ground services at airports. It also seeks to give Brussels a right to more closely scrutinize measures taken by member states to restrict airport noise, to ensure that the economic effects of such curbs are taken into account.
The commission’s proposals would need to be approved by the European Parliament and all 27 member states before they could become law, which could take a year or more.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=f1d3793cf00ee55cf201f948c6db3e6a
Speak Your Mind
You must be logged in to post a comment.