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KEY MESSAGES

• With the changing aircraft generations, and the evolution from early jets to the fly by wire technology, the automation on the flight deck has evolved over the years as well. It has however still not reached a point of maturity enabling operations with only one pilot in the cockpit without compromising flight safety. 
   
• For this reason, ECA currently does not support reduced or single pilot operations in CAT during any phase of flight.
   
• Future further development and increased use of automation in commercial aircraft, and eventually certification of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the use in this environment, should have as a goal enhancement of human capacity, and not its replacement. This in return would increase efficiency and most importantly enhance Flight Safety.
   
• Two specific concepts, eMCO and SiPO are currently being prepared for implementation in the near and mid-term future and raise great concern. It is crucial that all the safety risks stemming from both concepts are fully analysed, understood, and solved before any change to the standards is considered.
   
• The concepts are driven by the industry seeking reduction of pilots in the cockpit and increase of maximum flight duty time at zero cost. History has shown that putting economic gains, and even innovation, as primary goal – tends to have a detrimental influence on flight safety.

Introduction

IntroductionAviation is the safest transportation system in history by learning from its mistakes and a constant process of improving flight safety standards. 

Building on the knowledge and experience of over a century of commercial flights – the ultimate goal of technological and regulatory developments must not only be maintaining but enhancing aviation safety. This even more so given the expected post-crisis growth in air traffic which requires a constant improvement in safety levels.

The draft EASA concepts of eMCO and SiPO assume reduction of the number of highly qualified safety professionals – the pilots – from the flight deck and raise serious concern about the negative impact on flight safety.

The Extended Minimum Crew Operations concept (eMCO) aims to stretch the maximum flight time limitations by prolonging in flight rest for pilots. To achieve this, only one pilot would be required to remain at the controls for extended periods of the cruise phase while the other pilot would be resting most likely in an area out of the flight deck.

The next intended step for the industry is Single Pilot Operations (SiPO) – in which there will only be one pilot onboard at any given time during flight, also during critical phases of flight such as takeoff and landing. This would require an even higher degree of technical advancements and operating procedures.

Although these two concepts, eMCO and SiPO, can appear similar in nature and operation – they pose in fact both different and similar challenges. They should be treated as two separate types of operations as the defining difference is the on-board availability of a full 2-pilot crew in the eMCO concept – which is not the case in SiPO.

The ongoing COVID19 pandemic has dramatic consequences for the global airline industry, putting the entire industry and its workforce in what turned out to be the biggest crisis of the industry since World War II. 

For more than a year the daily life of thousands of pilots has changed dramatically. Frequent changes to entry and quarantine requirements for crews on duty create not only challenges for the airlines when it comes to planning flights in oder to guarantee global connectivity and supply of goods by air cargo, they have a direct impact on those crews who are still flying, creating what is now referred to often as the “new normal”.

While playing a vital part in providing connectivity and supply of goods by air, crew members have to endure in-room confinements on layovers or are faced with quarantine and border crossing restrictions when commuting home after their flights.

While some countries did not enact special restrictions for crew members on duty others have very strict rules. These often strictly enforced rules may include hotel lockdowns, not allowing crew members to leave the confinement of the hotel premisses. Some countries imposed even stricter rules including mandatory in-room confinements within the hotel room; not allowing pilots to leave the confinement of their rooms for nutrition, physical exercise or access to fresh air for several days. Upon return home from a trip, crew members are then faced with quarantine requirements at their place of residence.

An additional burden are ever changing travel restrictions for those pilots and other crew members who have to commute before and after flights to and from their countries of residence. Luxembourg like no other country in the EU, relies heavily on cross border workers. This fact is also true for pilots employed by Luxembourg’s airlines; many of them are commuting between Luxembourg and their country of residence within the EU, sometimes crossing several borders with different restrictions and at times unclear exemptions for commuting workers.

Find out more about this “new normal” during #COVID19 on CNN’s Quest Means Business, featuring among others ALPL President Capt. Darrell Myers.

Yesterday the transport ministers of Luxembourg, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Portugal signed a joint declaration [LINK] calling for a “socially responsible” aviation in Brussels. The signatories call on the European Commission and the other EU Member States to put the social rights of employees first in the recovery of Europe’s aviation, which finds itself in an unprecedented crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The declaration highlights that the COVID-19 crisis exposes some of the deep changes of the aviation industry that have built up over the last few years as a result of poor regulatory efforts: Serious legal uncertainty regarding applicable labour, social security and tax law, an uneven playing field within Europe’s single aviation market different levels of protection for workers and insufficient enforcement of rules at national level. All these pre-existing existing conditions deserve, according to Ministers “priority attention”, in order to allow a sustainable recovery of Europe’s aviation industry from the current crisis.

“The European aviation industry is in an unprecedented crisis due to the Corona Pandemic, to which effects of which Luxair, has been exposed to for months“, says ALPL General Secretary Dirk Becker. “We expressly welcome the declaration and Luxembourg’s Minister of Transport François Bausch’s involvement in creating this document. It is time for an agreement at European level to carry out the relaunch of Europe’s aviation following the COVID-19 crisis must be carried out in a socially responsible manner and that existing social flaws must be corrected.”

In order to address the problems of the aviation industry and to emerge stronger from the crisis, the ministers call for a better coordination between European and national transport as well as social authorities and urge for more legal certainty and effective enforcement of European and national rules. They also emphasise the need to address the social dimension in the upcoming revision of the EU aviation regulation and to implement the recommendations of the expert group on social matters related to aircrews.

“Airlines and their employees can only compete in the market and recover from the crisis if this market is made socially sustainable,” says Darrell Myers, ALPL President. “We hope that this declaration will receive broad support at EU level and across Europe to prevent that only socially unscrupulous airlines emerge as winners from the crisis, while airlines that act responsibly even in an existence threatening crisis are disadvantaged“.

Follow this link to the Press Releases available in English, German and French.

More information can be found here.

Unfortunately, this is not going to be a neat editorial with a thoughtful message, or a well-structured narrative and a satisfying ending.

As I write this, the World Health Organisation has just declared the Coronavirus outbreak and spread of Covid-19 a pandemic, and all of our plans, expectations, and usual assumptions are being tossed in the bin.

It is foremost a public health emergency, but the effect of the virus, and the measures needed to try and mitigate its spread, are an economic emergency too.

For the airline industry, we find ourselves at the forefront of both – as a scrutinised potential vector for transmission, and at the leading edge of the wave of economic damage surging forward.

Given that the virus is spread by social contact and gathering, with ‘social distancing’ and personal isolation the main measures to prevent spread, the airline industry is uniquely vulnerable.

We are an industry built upon enabling social ties between friends, family and business, and conducted through places where large numbers of people gather from all over the world (airports), where personal service is provided in enclosed spaces with many hundreds of people. Mandated social distancing and isolation cuts through this ‘raison d’être’ like a knife through butter.

And that is before the fear factor associated with being a potential transmission route, though paradoxically an airliner is a really good place to avoid actually catching it. Unlike an office or meeting room, a bus or a train, it receives a constant fresh supply of dried and sterilised air, that is scrubbed and filtered multiple times as it passes through the cabin from ceiling to floor, before being flushed overboard and replaced every few minutes. The cabin gets cleaned not just once a day, but on every single turnaround, before every time somebody new sits down. Not such a bad environment from a Covid perspective at least.

Any sector of the economy that is there to either enable or provide social connections, or which requires social connection processes to operate and function, is now in serious trouble, but the airline industry is almost certainly first in the firing line.

Make no mistake, this crisis is going to be grim. It is neither a Gulf war nor SARS, not September the 11th, or the 2008 financial crisis, but all of them. It is global rather than localised, it is going to last months as a minimum.

People have simply stopped flying.

At the time of writing Italy is in lockdown, and Europe and the US are a matter of weeks behind it on an epidemic curve that they follow inexorably. It cannot be excluded that the severe reduction in flying will be enforced rather than voluntary in the not too distant future.

So, what will happen to airlines?

The short answer is that a lot are likely to go bust.

Some observers appear to be thinking fairly short term and somehow hoping that airlines will muddle through, but I believe this is a failure of imagination.

Modelling of the outbreak suggests that in Europe it will rise for a few months, peak, and gradually reduce. If managed well, significant cases may dwindle just after summer (though this is not a given). Unfortunately many airlines make most of their money over the summer, and only break even or lose money in the off season, so for some it is not a case of making it through to the end of this outbreak, to go cash positive again they may need to stretch through to the beginning of summer 2021. That is a tall order, to put it mildly.

So, the game for airlines now is one of survival, and in some ways a simple mathematical task. Whatever cash pile (plus any other liquidity, available loans, re-purposed profits such as unissued dividends, etc) they have now is all they are going to get. They need to still have a small fraction of that left when the upswing comes and people decide to travel again, and they can once again generate more cash than they spend. Whatever it takes to stretch that cash pile from now to then, is what they have to do to survive. Many simply won’t be able to do that, and they will go under (or maybe in some more socially minded countries get nationalised).

I appreciate this is a fairly negative analysis (and if it turns out this all goes away in a few weeks and amounts to nothing, I will gladly eat my words and buy you a celebratory beer when you show this editorial to me in the future), but that does not mean there’s nothing we can do. With ‘normal’ tossed in the bin, now is the time to ask what the point of the enterprises known as airlines really is?

Does society permit them to exist, with all the expensive necessary infrastructure and regulation, just to generate ungodly bonuses for a tiny number of directors and returns for owners and shareholders? Or do we recognise that these companies have far more value to society as the skeleton on which much of the rest of the economy hangs? As the enabler for that personal social fabric and face to face contact that we are about to realise we take for granted and value above a great many things? Are we about to be reminded that there is more value in a complex enterprise like an airline in the fact that it provides high quality jobs and income to a great many people working inside and around an aircraft, an airport and in the wider economy?

I hope so. And I hope our pilot associations and unions manage to carry that message firmly into the headquarters of airlines in Europe and beyond. This is not the time to think about profits, or shareholder return – that will come later. This is the time to use that cash pile to preserve jobs, livelihoods, families and homes. Not least to fulfil their role in society for all the other people whose livelihoods are dependent on airline employees. This is an imperative in all sectors of the economy, but if airline managers don’t get this and act accordingly, they will see their carriers be the first domino in the economy to fall and start the cascade through other sectors.

Employees, including pilots, have to contribute to this survival of course – that cash pile needs to stretch far enough, whatever it takes, if jobs are to be there on the other side. But we have to, collectively – management and workforce – honestly see what changes we need to make it to the other side, not what one side wants. That cash needs to be deployed solely so that our businesses, and that is to say the people and jobs that make them up, are still there when this crisis abates. This crisis will only be successfully managed in a socially responsible manner.

Those that do survive and can then turn on the taps with availability and good will from their workforce, will ‘clean up’ when the upswing comes. Big time. People will be desperate to holiday and meet after being so restricted, businesses will want to burst out of the bubble-wrap and make up for the time and money they’ve lost. Without established competitors able to bring in capacity with volume, the prize is a vastly increased market share and profits for surviving airlines in a brave new world.

The airline industry that emerges from this crisis, will not look like the one that went into it.

A change is indeed gonna come. Grit your teeth and hang onto your hats.

Capt. Jon Horne, ECA President

An attentive EU-policy connoisseur knows that the revision of EU Air Services Regulation 1008/2008 is coming soon. This major piece of legislation sets the fundaments of how the aviation business works in Europe. It covers anything from licensing, leasing, to airline Ownership & Control rules. And unsurprisingly, it is unfit for purpose (read this if you want to know why). 

At the 13^th Air Forum in Florence, industry stakeholders discussed how to make it ‘fit’. 1008/2008 regulates with the default assumption that airlines offer air services across Europe from a designated Principal Place of Business. The problem is that this no longer reflects the economic reality in Europe. With a wealth of point-to-point airlines operating out of numerous bases, airlines can simply open multiple operational bases across the EU with little oversight over operations or safety.

By the time you are reading this article, 80% of people would have failed to achieve their 2020 New Year’s Resolutions. Millions of people worldwide pledge at the beginning of each year to introduce sweeping changes, mostly aiming at a better & healthier lifestyle, only to drop their ambitious plan several weeks later. 

Revamping pilot training has become a somewhat similar tradition as the New Year’s Resolutions. Year on year, the industry pledges to improve training in an effort to create ‘flight-deck ready’ pilots. This means not only pilot license holders who can fly but also manage operations in a complex and dynamic air transport system. But just like New Year’s resolutions, the industry largely fails to change its habits.