Aviation International News senior correspondent Ian Goold has been involved in aerospace since 1964 and in aviation media for more than 40 years. He enjoyed a 20-year career at Flight International magazine, where he was latterly air-transport editor before turning freelance in 1993. A winner of the European Regions Airline Association Hank McGonagle award for excellence in aerospace journalism and a Royal Aeronautical Society Aerospace Journalist of the Year global&nbsp;award, he has edited or contributed to aerospace and aviation magazines, special publications, and websites in Africa, Asia/Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America. Ian entered aerospace as an apprentice at the British Aircraft Corporation at Brooklands (Weybridge), where he worked on production and final assembly lines of the Vickers Super VC10, and BAC One-Eleven , and manufacture of Concorde major sub-assemblies. He subsequently graduated from the BAC Design Training School to work in the airframe structures drawing office (including design of international future projects, such as the Panavia Tornado multi-role combat aircraft) before joining Flight International in 1973. Apart from years of reading aircraft magazines and books, his first direct contact with aviation media had come during the early 1970s when he was involved at Brooklands with the Weybridge Man-powered Aircraft Group, which designed and built the tenth aircraft to fly under purely human power. As an aviation journalist, he has worked at more than&nbsp; 50 of the major biennial&nbsp;global and regional international aerospace industry shows at Le Bourget, Farnborough, Singapore, and Dubai (having missed attending only one "Farnborough" since 1960), plus innumerable NBAA, HAI, (U.S.) AOPA, and EBACE Conventions and ERA Assemblies. His favourite aircraft is the Hawker Hunter, of which – as a schoolboy – he heard hundreds make their first flights from Dunsfold, where also on September 24, 2013, he saw the penultimate landing of the VC10 (happily involving an example of which he had witnessed the maiden takeoff in 1970) a day before the last example made the design's final flight (unless, of course....).

Senior correspondent

Ian Goold

“Rumors of our death are greatly exaggerated,” according to European Regions Airline Association (ERA) director-general Mike Ambrose. However, the industry is facing major obvious challenges, including “high fuel prices, worldwide economic crisis, loss of consumer confidence, falling traffic and severely reduced prospects for growth and profitability even in traditionally strong markets.” 
Speaking just as the European Parliament (EP) environment committee decided to impose 100-percent auctioning of carbon emissions-trading scheme (ETS) permits for aviation by 2020, Ambrose said the vote imposed additional burdens on regional airlines already “crippled” by soaring costs and reduced consumer confidence. “This will add a further E6 million a year for a typical carrier. ERA and its members must sound a strong ‘wake-up’ call to political and civic leaders in Europe’s regions,” he urged.
The original proposals–later revised in recognition of industry opposition–were predicted to cost airlines an estimated E200 billion for the period between 2011 and 2020. The EP decision-making process had been “intellectually corrupt,” said Ambrose. “The fact that more than 1,100 amendments to the ‘mother directive’ were passed in one day without any impact assessment when so much is at risk– company survival, jobs and international access for Europe’s regions–is not only unacceptable, it is irresponsible,” he said. “States, regulators and politicians should see we are approaching a time when investment in airlines will cease because the cost of uncontrolled additional regulations will have changed the balance from ‘prudent investment’ to ‘lottery.’”
Citing International Energy Agency statistics, Ambrose claimed that the CO2 produced in generating the 19 percent of global electricity consumed by lighting is “three times more than the emissions from aviation. Policy measures to switch to energy-efficient lighting by 2030 would more than offset the total emissions of aviation.”
He further argued that governments must accept that aviation is “an essential tool to help rebuild European economies.” Increased regulation meant that almost 50 percent of costs were outside airlines’ control.
The ERA official suggested that industry investment could dry up because of extra rules when, in fact, government should treat the industry as an instrument for economic revival. He said European Union (EU) politicians and regulators were failing to accept the reality the industry faces and adding burdens without proper assessment of consequences.
Developing his concept of current realities in European air transport, Ambrose said there had been “unacceptably slow progress in implementation of the Single European Sky (SES), including reluctance of states to commit to implementation of functional airspace blocks and consequential damage to the business case for SES air-traffic management research [Sesar].” On safety, he bemoaned the lack of a “road map” for development of the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and the continuing pace of regulation.
Ambrose is encouraged that EC officials have adopted many industry ideas, including the need for an independent performance review, EU-wide performance targets and separation of regulation from service provision. As always, he has a ready list of outstanding industry requirements: public funding for pre-financing of Sesar, rejection of proposals to link airport and air-traffic flow management “slots,” and “unbundling” of services to help reduce costs.
ERA officials also are continuing to raise safety and operational concerns with Eurocontrol regarding the much-vaunted prospect of skies becoming darkened by hordes of small high-performance aircraft. They are worried about the lack of any requirement for very light jets (VLJs) to carry traffic-alert collision-avoidance systems (TCAS) and the fact that they can be operated by single pilots in congested airspace. “Eurocontrol now recognizes and is acting on these problems.”
Ambrose concluded that airlines “face problems that are much more significant than those following 9/11. The industry’s challenges are now vastly overshadowed by the larger economic crisis. We are going to see a lot more airlines fail this winter.”

Challenges abound for Euro regionals

“Rumors of our death are greatly exaggerated,” according to European Regions Airline Association (ERA) director-general Mike Ambrose.

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