Slow at best

Bilateral Air Services Agreements are the hub around which international airlines ply their trade, designating where they can fly and how many flights they can operate. Many want them replaced by multilateral treaties, bringing more freedom to the world’s skies… but don’t hold your breath for an early breakthrough.

There’s no doubt that Stephen Borthwick is more than a little frustrated. The Acting Executive Director, Aviation and Airports, at Australia’s Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development, says there has been talk for some time around replacing the bilateral air service agreement system with multilateral treaties on liberalization, intended to replace all the bilateral agreements. Right now, they are a central plank of the Warsaw Convention which was established in 1929. But it was last amended as far back as 1975. While Australia is at the cutting edge of liberalization, Borthwick says that for a global industry at the forefront of technology and innovation “we have a regulatory system that was really designed when the horse and cart was the preferred mode of transport and we haven’t really moved on since then”.

Moving on, it seems, is a problem. “Only a few weeks ago – I’m not sure whether this coincides with when I started to feel sick (he developed a touch of the flu) – I chaired a meeting in Montreal of the ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) group that’s tasked with developing multilateral agreement. And if you think family conversations around the Christmas dinner table are hard you should see a bunch of member states in the room start talking about lifting restrictions. It’s fair to say at that meeting we couldn’t even agree on the definition of what liberalization was in terms of the number of freedoms that should be lifted.”