It is difficult to think of a reason to regret the latest agreement to form a European Aviation Safety Authority (EASA). It is, alas, equally difficult to think of a single ground for optimism that the EASA's birth will be easy.
European air-safety regulation, be it on certification or on operations, has always suffered from fragmentation and the impact of special national interests. Examples are legion of how this lack of harmony has harmed not only suppliers from other countries but also the very industries which Europe's little nationalists have sought to protect.
The continued national (or sometimes European-wide) insistence on peculiar certification requirements in the face of all logic and history has already delivered such gems as the European stick-pusher on the non-deep-stalling Boeing MD-80/90 series, and the continued absence from UK skies of the world's most successful business turboprop, the T-tailed Raytheon Beech King Air family.
Fragmentation in word and deed has similarly given us the protracted farce over the establishment of the Joint Aviation Requirements on operations (JAR-Ops).
Some - although by no means all - of problems such as these could have been solved if Europe's first attempt at a pan-European body, the Joint Airworthiness Authorities had been given a sporting chance by being set up as a legal entity instead of being strangled by being born as a loose association of national bodies. As a legal entity it could have at least had the power to address matters within its remit with some authority (although with membership drawn from both inside and outside the European Union (EU) it would almost certainly have suffered from the inability to get all its powers accepted in law by the EU nations).
Such problems and experiences serve merely to hint at the obstacles and frustrations which face those optimists who would now set up the EASA. European aviation regulation has been in the hands of individual national authorities for so long that many of them find it inconceivable that any other national or supra-national body could possibly know more or better than they on most topics. There are two broad groups of such authorities: those which believe that they hold the high moral and technical ground, and that the rest are primitive creatures with unacceptably low standards; and those which think that the high-grounders are trying to impose impossibly high standards for their own national advantage. Couple that with serious differences over what is the high ground anyway, and there is little cause for optimism over a uniform standard on just about anything.
The problem in finding a common standard is accentuated to the point of near impossibility of solution by the lack of a common language in European regulation. Much of the problem over the JAR-Ops has lain in the need to agree all the complicated clauses in each of the working languages of the EU.
There are those who would automatically dismiss any suggestion of writing all the appropriate regulations in English (and allowing translations into other languages for local convenience but not for legal interpretation) as yet another example of national interest, but English is the nearest thing to a common language in aviation, and is the closest to the language in which are written all the dictates of the greatest aviation regulator of all, the USA's Federal Aviation Administration.
As the ultimate aim of all regulators must be the eventual establishment of a single global set of standards and regulations to govern a uniquely global industry, this must be the only logical way forward. It would not be an easy solution either to sell to the participants or to implement, but it must be the only one if the EASA is not to be rendered as toothless as the JAA.
However daunting the problems, the case for a single European aviation authority is overwhelming and long overdue. The European Union is to be congratulated for pushing the issue through with considerable dexterity, but the trick now is how to get the politicians to complete the legal framework for the safety body to operate successfully and then withdraw, leaving EASA with the independence it needs to get on with the difficult task ahead.
Source: Flight International
