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

The European Regions Airline Association (ERA) is challenging legislators and politicians to cooperate more with carriers when formulating regulations rather than “continue persecuting” operators and risk reducing global competitiveness. ERA called for officials to apply their own procedures for better regulation as <a href="?q=node/24568">literal and metaphorical clouds</a> overshadowed its eighth annual spring conference last month, held in Edinburgh, Scotland. 
As the meteorological situation unfolded overhead (see article on page 1), the European lobby group, which represents 65 intra-regional airlines, published an open letter to the European Commission (EC), European Union (EU) Council, and European Parliament (EP) seeking a partnership toward common goals. “Air transport is operating in the most adverse economic conditions it has ever faced,” said ERA president Antonis Simigdalas, chief executive of Greek carrier Olympic Air. “Its viability is threatened by multiple complex external factors, even without poorly constructed and often unnecessary regulation.”
ERA director-general Mike Ambrose said industry cooperation in developing “simple, effective regulations that will advance our common interests and improve the lives of European citizens [could] only be achieved if our collective knowledge and advice are taken seriously.” The industry cannot keep absorbing the cost of additional regulation. “Nice-to-have regulations are not affordable,” Ambrose told AIN.
Given that ERA has long called for such change, especially for greater consultation, Ambrose said there now exists a “much higher” level of concern, since the industry remains in “quite serious” trouble. “The only upside is a feeling among stoical but cautiously optimistic ERA presidents that the financial crisis has bottomed out,” he said. “They have launched measures to survive through cuts in jobs, routes and capacity,” creating “a much leaner and fitter industry able to take advantage of the upturn–but can we survive to the upturn?” he asked.
Ambrose wants regulators to consider the proportionately higher impact of legal requirements on operators of smaller regional airliners. “Some routes are only ever profitable with 30 to 50 seats but are important because they provide international access to communities and are therefore a fundamental driver of air-transport development,” he said. “The additional costs arising from regulations fall in an area of discretion.” Meanwhile, increasing capacity to reduce seat-mile costs won’t work. “Bigger aircraft are uneconomical on ‘small’ routes and loss of routes is damaging and contrary to EU aims,” concluded Ambrose.
Regional airlines were becoming “more and more disillusioned with initiatives that do not seem that coherent,” said Simigdalas. “We are therefore seeking some kind of order and justification [for] how legislation that controls us comes about. The EC, [EU] Council, and EP have an inescapable responsibility to ensure that new legislation is based on solid ‘better regulation’ principles and processes if it is to be credible, relevant and acceptable to the public and industry.”

Trying to prompt airlines to greater action, Irish Aviation Authority chief executive Eamonn Brennan urged conference delegates to lobby national governments harder to allow the merger of air traffic control (ATC) centers as the only way for the emerging Single European Sky to offer 50-percent lower costs compared with the current system. “We really need a paradigm shift in handling ATC,” he said, while suggesting that all European en route traffic could be run from a single “bunker.”
Brennan teased delegates by saying that ATC providers could charge what they wanted because operators had to pay “or you won’t fly.” Ironically, many of the ERA presidents couldn’t fly home for several days because volcanic ash clouds meant completely closed controlled airspace: airlines could not fly at any price.&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;

Economy, volcanic ash cloud ERA conference

The European Regions Airline Association (ERA) is challenging legislators and politicians to cooperate more with carriers when formulating regulations rath

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