Fly wherever you want

The government abolished quotas for domestic air transportation

The new procedure for licensing air transport, approved by government decree in June, came into force yesterday. As the head of the Federal Air Transport Agency (Rosaviation) Evgeny Bachurin said at a press conference on this matter, now the subject of licensing will be air transport activities as such, and not the right to operate on certain routes , as before. That is, theoretically, with the introduction of a new licensing procedure, any Russian airline will be able to operate on any domestic Russian route it wishes.

The previous procedure, known as “route quotas,” has been in effect in civil aviation since 1998. Accordingly, the procedure for admitting airlines to airport services should now become much more liberal. True, these issues, as Oleg Trufanov, director of the department of state policy in the field of civil aviation of the Ministry of Transport, said yesterday, will be determined later, in a document being developed by the ministry on the procedure for creating airline schedules and distributing airport slots (time intervals for taking off and landing). This document must be drawn up during October and submitted for registration to the Ministry of Justice in the same month.

According to Mr. Bachurin, Rosaviation expects to transition to the new licensing procedure smoothly. It will come into full effect with the introduction of the 2008 summer schedule (it traditionally comes into force in April). Until then, companies holding old-style licenses for certain domestic and international routes can continue to operate on the basis of these documents.

With international destinations the situation is more complicated, Mr. Bachurin recalled, since there the number of flying companies is, as a rule, limited by bilateral intergovernmental agreements and these companies have the special status of designated air carriers. Nevertheless, Mr. Trufanov said that the Ministry of Transport is now developing a regulation designed to make the process of issuing permits for international flights more objective and formalized. According to him, decisions in this area are proposed to be made on the basis of a scale of approximately thirty criteria, which includes the characteristics of the aircraft fleet of the interested airline, its previous experience in the airline business, the presence or absence of complaints from aviation authorities and customers, etc.

Within the country, it is planned to apply essentially the same procedure in order to eliminate the possibility of unjustified preferences (and equally unjustified refusals of service) to airlines on the part of airports. “Today, the most serious problem that airlines face at airports is the coordination and distribution of slots,” noted the head of Rosaviation.

To make this process more transparent, the country's airports are proposed to be divided into three levels. First-tier airports will be those whose capacity significantly exceeds the number of slots requested by airlines. It is believed that this level is “uncoordinated” and that such air harbors will be able to serve all interested companies. In any case, on their own initiative, “uncoordinated” airports will not have to refuse anyone. The second level will be “partially coordinated.” These will include airports where the capacity approximately matches the airlines' demands; however, intervention from higher aviation authorities may be necessary to allocate slots during peak season or on hottest routes. Finally, at third-level airports, where the number of requested flights significantly exceeds available capacity, the distribution of slots will be regulated by Rosaviation based on the same criteria that Mr. Trufanov named when speaking about international routes.

Airlines yesterday chose not to comment on the innovations.

Mikhail KUKUSHKIN