Airlines
EC Aviation Official Urges Slot Allocation Review
Director general of mobility and transport Henrik Hololei sees airlines’ agenda at odds with good public policy
EC director general for transport Henrik Hololei
EC director general for transport Henrik Hololei

European Commission director general of mobility and transport Henrik Hololei has criticized Europe’s legacy airlines for maintaining artificial capacity constraints present in many airports, vowing to put the revision of the EU slot regulation high on the agenda of his department. “We need to modernize and improve it [the EU slot regulation] as we need to incentivize secondary trading and we need better management of scarce capacity," the EC’s top civil servant on transport matters said. “But some operators are actually quite happy with the present situation that guarantees them slots through grandfathering and there is little incentive to change and open up to new entrants and thus increase competition.”