UK Airlines Start Their Brexit Contingency Planning

摘要

As they begin to arrange summer 2019 flight schedules, UK-focused airlines are having to second guess under what sort of terms the UK will leave the European Union in just over two years’ time. The UK government is still planning to trigger Article 50 next month, giving it just two years to extract itself from decades of EU laws affecting all aspects of life - not least aviation. Irish Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary says he’s contingency-planning for 500 different scenarios ranging from “Armageddon,” where all flights between the UK and Europe stop the day after Brexit, to the business-as-usual of continued unfettered access to the EU’s single aviation market. O’Leary said last week that Ryanair was considering moving its entire fleet to mainland Europe. Certainly all the 65 new aircraft due to be delivered to the Irish budget airline during the two-year negotiating period will be based elsewhere. Low-cost UK rival easyJet is already in the process of arranging an Air Operator Certificate (AOC) in another EU country so that it can continue fly- ing between EU member states, whatever happens. Some 30% of easyJet flights are completely outside of the UK. “This one-off cost is expected to total around ￡10 million over two years with up to ￡5 million incurred in the 2017 financial year (￡400k incurred in Q1). The primary driver of the cost is the re-registering of aircraft in an EU AOC jurisdiction,” easyJet said in its third-quarter financial statement released Jan. 24.