Richard North's
EU Referendum blog picks up on yesterday's IATA Press Release and teleconference under the heading "Brexit: the inevitable consequence will be chaos".
North seems to think that even IATA's analysis may be over optimistic. "Wrongly,
[ due to an element of political naivety] IATA has been led to believe that the most likely outcome of the Brexit negotiations is that the UK will become a third country member of EASA. But since this cannot happen, this leaves as the only credible option the negotiation of a bilateral aviation safety agreement (BASA), the conclusion of which might take some years.
Note the words towards the end: "What this boils down to is that, as far as the aviation industry is concerned, a "no deal" Brexit is simply not an option. The Reuters report
[of the Press Conference I think - slast] has IATA saying that a no-deal Brexit "could wreak chaos for travellers and a nightmare at airports", which is even more certain than the trade association surmises. The effects would most certainly be even more severe than it anticipates, and resolving the issues would be harder and take longer than it suggests.
One therefore cannot dispute the comments of
[ IATA's Director General and CEO] de Juniac at a
teleconference to launch his report, where he observed that even a transition period of two years would be a "challenging time frame" to sort out the issue. "But", he added, "if the UK leaves the EU with a 'hard Brexit' in March 2019 then it is hard to see how all this work can be achieved. The inevitable consequence will be chaos".
There is something rather final about the word "inevitable". And when the Director General of IATA uses it, the UK government needs to sit up and take notice."