Regulation on charter flights
 

Dear all,

I am doing a research for my phd-studies on how the open skies/horizontal agreements have had an impact on the current market and how it would create opportunities in the future when the crisis will change for already established carriers.

My research has shown that a lot of charter carriers in Europe have had to pay money/royalty to carriers in Turkey, Egypt and other countries in the Northern Africa for route rights. The problem has been when for example a Dutch carrier wanted to operate charter flights out of Germany or Belgium to Turkey or Egypt. They would not be granted charter rights as they were not holding a valid AOC from either Germany or Belgium and the rights where only allowed to carrier from country a (Turkey/Egypt) or country b (Belgium/Germany) – not country c (Holland).

I have had very difficult in finding cases where a European country has actually blocked another European carrier for flying the operation from country a to country b having a valid AOC in country c which is within Europe. This could be in a situation where an Italian carrier wanted to operate out of Germany to India or Thailand and was holding a valid Italian AOC. The German CAA or Governmental Authorities would not grant the route rights to the Italian carrier as the local available capacity of charter aircrafts was high.

Hope you could come up with some cases which I may Google up and use for my studies.

Thanks in advance

Its very strange you mention this as i was talking about this to a friend not too long ago as the airline i work for had this problem last year.

We are an airline based in Country A and we were to operate flights to 2 destinations in Turkey from country B. But in order to do these flights we had to depart from country A and stop in country B (30 mins flight) for a crew change and then onto Turkey. In order to do the flight direct we had to give one of the routes up to a turkish carrier. We dropped those routes this year and and Onur Air is operating both of them. Alot of countries seem to have these regulations in order to keep their own airlines in work. Highly unfair in my opinion but thats because i'm on the losing end of it.

I'd love to hear about other simular stories.

I think you've missed the point slightly.

In the EU, deregulation has effectively removed controls on intra-EU routes. Routes from EU countries to non-EU countries are often still the subject of bi-lateral agreements between governements - ie the market has not been opened. hence the need for seperate agreements, arrangements or licencing for these routes.

This is changing - the biggest example being US - EU - but not all countries subscribe to the unbridled, free market ideal either for economic or political reasons. fairness is not an issue in business or politics :)

MD

would that not be 5th freedom rights?

where EU airlines are generally permitted to operate between any EU countries, and from their "home country" to a second country. However, they're not permitted generally to operate from another EU country to a country outside of the EU.

hence if you look at TUI, they operate 6 EU based airlines, if route licences were easy, there'd be just one TUI airline.....

I don't think I said route licences were easy to obtain ...... I said that freedom of operation did not exist and licences or other arrangements were possible. The likes of TUI, XL, Thomas Cook have seperate AOCs in different countries precisely to make it easier to obtain such rights. I don't think however that was the original question.

MD