Some airlines may be banned from flying to Europe
The government list includes such major international carriers as Air France-KLM, Lufthansa, Alitalia, Qantas, Emirates, US Airways, Delta Air Lines, as well as the military aviation of Russia and Israel. Among Russian civilian carriers, besides Aeroflot and Atlant-Soyuz, also listed are Yamal, S7, Utair, Orenburg Airlines, Kavminvodyavia, KD Avia, Transaero, and many others.
All listed companies must reduce harmful emissions by three percent starting January 2012 compared to the average annual value calculated for the period from 2004 to 2006. In addition, starting January 1, 2010, carriers must begin monitoring greenhouse gas emissions and present to the European Union authorities a methodology for accounting and calculating harmful emissions volumes.
Those carriers that do not reduce harmful emissions and do not conduct monitoring may face severe sanctions. In the best case, a company whose aircraft do not meet the new requirements will be fined; in the worst case, it will lose its permit to fly to Europe.
Other details of the new legislation are not yet known. The list of airlines includes all carriers that have been flying to Europe since January 1, 2006. It is possible that the list will be adjusted in the future, since some of the companies in it meet EU environmental standards.
In addition, the list also includes some companies that were declared bankrupt or lost their flight licenses in 2008-2009. In particular, these are Krasnoyarsk Airlines (declared bankrupt in July 2009) and the German Blue Wings (lost its flight license in April 2009).
Meanwhile, the adoption of the law on harmful gas emissions by airlines has sparked protests from the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the International Air Transport Association (IATA). These organizations believe that the aviation industry should not be subject to special environmental regulation, since it is even excluded from the provisions of the Kyoto Protocol.
ICAO, a branch of the United Nations, is one of the main global regulators that set international standards for civil aviation. IATA, in turn, acts as a coordinator and representative of the air transport industry and participates in the development of standards together with ICAO.
In mid-July 2009, the European Commission released an updated list of airlines banned from flying over EU territory for security reasons. The 'black list' included almost all carriers from Kazakhstan (except Air Astana) and Kyrgyzstan, as well as four Ukrainian companies. At the same time, restrictions were lifted from four Indonesian airlines.
Among the Ukrainian carriers that can no longer fly to the EU are Volare Aviation Enterprise, Ukrainian Mediterranean Airlines, and Motor Sich. In total, the list includes 194 airlines from North Korea, Afghanistan, Sudan, Cambodia, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Liberia, Swaziland, Zambia, Congo, and some other countries. The 'black list' includes all airlines whose aircraft, according to EU authorities, do not meet European safety standards.
The idea of creating a pan-European 'black list' of unsafe airlines first appeared in January 2004 after the crash of an Egyptian airline Flash Airlines. The plane crash killed 148 people, mostly French citizens. It later emerged that Flash Airlines' operations had been banned in Switzerland. After this incident, several EU countries immediately created their own 'black lists'.
The idea of a pan-European list of unreliable companies was finalized in August 2005, when major plane crashes in Greece and Venezuela killed 121 and 160 people respectively. Most of the victims were French and Belgian. After these two incidents, the European Parliament received 'black lists' from EU member states and created a pan-European list based on them. The first list of 92 carriers was published in March 2006. The list released in July 2009 is already the 11th. No Russian airlines are on it.
The enactment of the law on limiting carbon dioxide emissions may force some airlines with outdated aircraft fleets that fly to Europe to renew their planes. The remaining carriers, however, are unlikely to fear sanctions, since the manufacturers of the aircraft they own take into account the maximum number of the most common international standards for transport environmental friendliness and safety at the design stage.
Vasily Sychev.
Lenta.ru