Mr. James Courtney:

I will explain the flight time limitations and their history. Flight time limitations have been in place across Europe for many years. Historically, each member state had different flight time regulations in place so Europe tried to standardise flight time limitations across the states. There were always differences between each member state. For example, one of them that has come up for discussion is that Ireland had a calendar year which ran from April to March for some of our airlines while other airlines used January to December. A number of other differences appeared in regulations so Europe wished to standardise them across the Continent. In 2014, after many years of negotiations with many interested parties, the European Aviation Safety Agency, EASA, finally came up with a set of flight time regulations, known as Commission Regulation No. 83/2014. All countries and airlines in the member states were required to be compliant with these regulations by 18 February 2016. All Irish airlines implemented these requirements in full and met the target date of 18 February 2016.

Obviously the flight time regulations are very detailed. However, I will outline some of the specific requirements relating to the flight times and duty periods. The duty period is the time a crew member is available to do a duty for the airline operator. The regulation provides that the total duty periods to which a crew member may be assigned shall not exceed 60 hours in any seven consecutive days, 110 hours in any 14 consecutive days and 190 hours in any 28 consecutive days, spread as evenly as practicable throughout that period. The flight time is effectively the time one is flying an aircraft, to put it broadly. The restrictions there are that the total flight time of the sectors on which an individual crew member is assigned as an operating crew member shall not exceed 100 hours of flight time in any 28 consecutive days and, importantly, 900 hours of flight time in any calendar year. In our case, the calendar year was April to March and in others it was January to December. There is also an additional restriction of 1,000 hours of flight time in any 12 consecutive calendar months. Members will see that there are many restrictions with respect to duty times and flight times.

Most other EU member states traditionally used the January to December calendar year. We entered into discussions with EASA and the EU Commission on this subject and it came across to us that the Europeans wanted to harmonise the regulations across Europe as far as possible. We agreed with them in 2015 and 2016 that we would get all our airlines to comply with the January to December calendar year. We advised all our airlines that had an April to March calendar year that they would have to be compliant with the January to December calendar year, as agreed with the European Commission.

It has been suggested that an April to March calendar year gives the airline a commercial advantage. That is absolutely not true. The reason is that there are so many restrictions relating to the hours a pilot can operate per day, per week and per month. There is no advantage, commercially or otherwise, to which calendar year the airline used. The reason the EU wanted this harmonised across Europe was the free movement of pilots and cabin crew across different airlines if they wished to do that.