Captain Evan Cullen:

By way of introduction, I am president of the Irish Airline Pilots' Association, IALPA, which represents 1,200 professional pilots who are employed largely in Irish airlines but also throughout the world. I am accompanied by Captain Simon Croghan, vice president of IALPA and Philip von Schöppenthau, secretary general of the European Cockpit Association, the umbrella group for pilot associations across Europe, representing some 40,000 professional pilots in airlines such as Lufthansa, Iberia, KLM and British Airways. Captain Paul Cullen is the director of safety and technical for IALPA. He is also an accredited air accident investigator.

At the heart of IALPA's concern is the failure for some time now of the European Aviation Safety Agency, EASA, to consider and include its own scientific research in the proposals on flight time limitations for pilots and cabin crew. We will highlight three or four specific examples of our concerns. The overall concern is that EASA, for reasons that have never been explained to us, continues to ignore the recommendations of its own scientific appointees, not just in the recent 12-month period of this continuing process but also in a previous process when scientific results were ignored.

The position of the airline pilots' associations across Europe is that we do not come to these discussions with anything other than the use of the scientific evidence that was procured by EASA itself. We are not using our own figures or any other figures except the figures supplied by the scientists. We cannot understand why EASA does not do the same. I will hand over to Captain Paul Cullen who will deliver a PowerPoint presentation.