Ryanair and Europe's other four big airlines had been expecting yesterday's announcement of an EU aviation strategy for some time. The five carriers, some of them bitter business rivals, signalled during the summer that they were planning to form an industry association to represent their interests in Brussels.
The group is more or less up and running and is expected to get a chief executive, whose main job will be lobbying EU mandarins, some time early in the new year. Their key task will be ensuring that the big carriers, Ryanair, Aer Lingus parent, IAG, Air France-KLM, Lufthansa and Easyjet, have as much input as possible into the final version of the EU's aviation strategy. They released a joint statement yesterday which homed in on the fact that airport charges are going up while their fares have been falling. This was no surprise, the conflict between the two sides of the industry, airlines and airports, is nothing new. Airlines believe airports spend too much money needlessly, airports believe airlines are unwilling to pay for much-needed infrastructure. Another issue that rankles with Europe's airlines is the belief that the political support that Gulf carriers, Emirates, Etihad and Qatar, receive at home gives them an unfair edge over their EU rivals, which are expected to compete commercially with them and each other, with no state support.
This promises to be a difficult issue. The EU wants a mandate to extend its air transport agreements to those carriers’ home countries. Doing this, in theory, should allow any airline licensed in any member State to fly from anywhere in the EU to the Gulf and vice versa. Lufthansa and Air France KLM, may see this as a priority, while Ryanair and Easyjet, may be more concerned at airport charges. So the new chief executive could be doing a lot of juggling.