Mr. James Courtney:

It is a valid question to ask. The regulation said that airlines had to comply with 900 hours in any calendar year. That is how the regulation was written. We met the European Aviation Safety Agency, EASA, to discuss that element of the regulation. In our discussions with EASA and the European Commission, it became clear that they wanted to get to a situation where there was harmonisation across the board. In the context of the free movement of people between airlines and so forth, it was advantageous that everybody would operate on a January to December calendar year. We agreed with that. We came back and instructed the airlines that had the April to March calendar year that they would have to become compliant. However, having sat down with them, we realised that there was a significant amount of work involved in achieving that, particularly for the larger airlines such as Ryanair. The airlines had from early 2016 right through to the deadline we agreed with them, namely 1 January 2018, to become compliant. Aer Lingus became compliant on 1 January 2017.

I must make another important point. Deputy Smith suggested that there is some advantage in having an April to March calendar year in the sense that a company can work people harder during the summer months and so forth but that is absolutely not true. There is a limitation, which I mentioned earlier, of 100 hours of flight time in any 28 consecutive days. That is a restriction which is in place to balance out the workload across the year. An airline cannot suddenly overwork people during the summer period because of that restriction of 100 hours in any 28 consecutive days. That point must be made very strongly because the argument has been made in various fora that the April to March calendar gives some advantage to airlines. It does not have a safety implication. Moving to the January to December calendar levels it all off and creates harmonisation across Europe, allowing pilots to transfer across Europe and so forth.

The new regulations came into force in February 2016. EASA came over to us with an inspection team, as part of a wide inspection. It wanted to see how we implemented the flight time regulations that were required to be implemented by February 2016. In March 2016, the EASA report was published. It found that one of the main strengths of the authority was its "well managed transition" to the new flight and duty times, FTL, requirements. EASA, having had discussions with us, made that statement. The agency said that we managed the transition to the new flight and duty time requirements.. I hope that answers the Deputy's question but if she has a follow up-----