Right from the beginning, the airlines and their European organizations (AEA, IACA, ERA, ELFAA) rejected the idea of underpinning EU FTL rules by scientific and medical evidence. Still before the adoption of EU-OPS they lobbied hard against an obligation for the EU Institutions to carry out a scientific evaluation of the new FTL rules. They failed: both the European Parliament and Transport Ministers mandated such an evaluation to be carried out within 2 years (see “Legal Obligation to Change”).

Consequently, two months before the official publication of EASA's scientific evaluation ('Moebus Report'), AEA started a campaign to discredit the study, the scientists and their findings, and putting pressure on EASA to withdraw its support from the study. In their (unofficial) position paper of Nov. 2008, AEA alleges among others that the study “lacks any scientific credibility” and that its recommendations would “likely add more than 1 Billion Euro to the AEA member crew cost” and “will result in business shifting to non-EU airlines”.[1]

The airline associations also allege that there is no need to change the current EU rules because no major accident has been caused by fatigue in recent years, in Europe (no accident = rules are safe). What they fail to explain is that many (if not most) carriers are actually operating according to stricter provisions in their company-specific labour agreements (CLAs), and in several countries they are also bound by stricter national FTL rules. Hence, the absence of accidents is not due to the EU rules, but rather due to the stricter CLAs and national rules. – If the current rules of Subpart Q were actually applied in all EU countries and by all airlines, Europe would hardly be a safe place to board a plane.

Both in their public statements and in their daily lobbying work, AEA, ELFAA, IACA and ERA do everything they can to prevent efforts to create a new generation of FTL rules based on scientific and medical evidence. Intense lobbying vis-à-vis EASA, the Transport Commissioner Siim Kallas, EU Member States and Euro-parliamentarians has resulted not only in a NPA which disregards such evidence, but also in a general climate where the airlines’ commercial interests overturn science-based safety considerations. The looser will be Europe’s passengers.

ECA deplores the airlines’ irresponsible, cost-driven attitude, as well as the EU Institution’s failure to resist the operators’ lobbying and to make passenger safety their priority Number One. 

[1] AEA on the Moebus Report: "The report is a study of fatigue - not of flight safety. Therefore, it is not worth the paper it is written on, and if the politicians recognize its conclusions, they are incompetent" says [AEA] general manager Vincent De Vroej.

(translation from an article in the Danish daily newspaper EPN, Erhverv På Nettet, on 6 Jan. 2009.) See also: ERA Press Release, 22 Jan. 2009.