With the introduction of the second phase of the Single European Sky (SES II), the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) will greatly increase its scope by assuming responsibility for safety regulation of the region’s ATC structure and its airports. The EASA succeeds Europe’s Joint Aviation Authorities. That agency was charged with promoting aviation standardization across the 27 member nations of the European Union (EU) but had limited enforcement power. In 2003 it became part of the EASA, an official arm of the EU.
The EASA will now have the legislative clout to require EU member nations to meet uniform policies and standards. In a sense, it will bring Europe more in line with the U.S., where the FAA has total responsibility for establishing and enforcing aviation standards. So Europe will have comparable–but not necessarily identical–rules in all the same areas as the FAA. There is one important difference: the EU is composed of the stakeholding nations that are its members, and it is their individual budgets that would be affected by EASA decisions, such as, for example, upgrading ATC facilities throughout the region to a new standard.
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