Transatlantic open skies draft ‘designed to bolster US interests’ – BA chairman

A draft US-Europe open skies pact is no more than a “template to bolster US interests”, the chairman of British Airways has claimed.

Martin Broughton said it offered “miniscule concessions dressed up as significant breakthroughs”.

“Once the US have achieved their prime negotiating objectives of achieving an open skies deal, its motivation to liberalise further will evaporate,” he warned.

At the heart of the US model are unlimited traffic rights for US airlines to fly not just between the US and the EU, but onwards into the EU single market and beyond to the rest of the world.

But access to the US domestic market, the biggest in the world, remains closed to EU airlines, and the opportunities for them to fly beyond the US are limited, he claimed.

“BA supports the Commission’s mandate to negotiate not an open skies deal but an open aviation area based on the model of the EU internal aviation market,” he said.

The key difference is the issue of relaxing the regulations surrounding the ownership and control of US airlines. The US negotiators had ruled this out, however, by refusing to consider any item that would require the endorsement of Congress, according to Broughton.

The negotiators had been left to “creatively scrape the barrel by including existing US policy on ownership limits and franchising into the draft agreement,” he claimed.

Implicit in the Commission’s mandate is the freedom to offer 100% ownership and control of EU airlines to US interests so long as it is reciprocated. But only Congress can deliver what the EU has been mandated to negotiate, so ultimately the discussions will have to go to Congress, he said.

“Chancellor Merkel of Germany, the current president of the EU, has recently proposed to President Bush that the EU and the US should form a transatlantic economic area, a single market in which the regulatory barriers to the movement of people, goods and capital across the Atlantic would be minimised.” Said Broughton.

“A transatlantic open aviation area could represent an important component of such an agreement. Settling for a US model open skies deal now would be selling Europe short.

“The German presidency and the rest of the council must not be satisfied with a bad deal. So my message to the council is to continue to keep its sights high and push the negotiators to deliver a deal that can change the future, not cement in the past,” he said

by Phil Davies