COULD there be no more flights between Britain and the rest of the European Union after a no-deal Brexit in March? That is what the British government said in a technical note published on September 24th about the worst case scenarios of what happens if Britain crashes out of the bloc without any agreement being made. Several airline bosses, most notably Michael O’Leary of Ryanair, a low-cost carrier, have been warning about this for years and accuse the government of having no credible plan to avoid it. In the words of Alexandre de Juniac, the director general of the International Air Transport Association, a trade group for airlines:

The UK government’s papers on the air transport implications of a “no deal” departure from the EU clearly exposes the extreme seriousness of what is at stake and underscores the huge amount of work that would be required to maintain vital air links. It is not just permission for flights to take off and land. Everything from pilots’ licenses to security arrangements need to be agreed.

The fears of a no-deal Brexit have grown in the past week after EU leaders rejected an agreement based on Britain’s Chequers plan and with the leadership of the opposition Labour party resisting moves towards a more anti-Brexit position at its annual conference. A no-deal Brexit will harm British flyers, due to a reduction of competition between airlines in Britain. But even the most Europhile diplomats from EU countries think the idea of planes being grounded after Brexit is “ridiculous”.

The European Common Aviation Area, founded in the early 1990s, governs flying rights within the EU. Under it every European owned and controlled airline is allowed to fly between any two airports in the bloc. In theory, if Britain leaves the EU without a bilateral deal on flying rights with the remaining member states, carriers would no longer be able to fly between the two.



Yet European diplomats from several European countries that Gulliver has spoken to think that idea is for the birds. They point out that there have been periods in the past when flights have continued without a bilateral deal in place, such as between Britain and Canada. If they stopped flights between Britain and Europe, they would face howls of protest from influential flag carriers such as Air France-KLM and Lufthansa of Germany—which would risk losing their valuable take-off and landing slots at London’s Heathrow Airport if it took longer than five weeks or so to reach a deal—as well as from Mediterranean hoteliers left with empty resorts in the summer. Some sort of last minute muddle-through on bilateral flights between Britain and Europe is likely. Some diplomats remember that the EU took action to stop Greece and other countries falling out of the euro-currency area in 2012, but only at the very last minute, and think something similar will happen again.

A greater threat, and one that governments in Britain and the rest of the EU have not taken as seriously as they should, is the threat of British airlines being forbidden from flying between destinations within the EU and European airlines within Britain. If the EU were to treat British airlines as it does American ones, EasyJet, a big low-cost airline, would not be allowed to fly between France and Germany, for instance. It has already registered a subsidiary in Austria to try and ensure that it can continue to fly such routes after Brexit, but the law is not clear on whether that is enough or whether a full financial separation of the division into EU majority ownership is needed. Full-service carriers with higher fares, such as Air France-KLM and Lufthansa, are widely suspected of lobbying hard for a strict intepretation of the current rules in order to exile British carriers back to their homeland. And so it is becoming clearer that if Britain cannot forge a deal to replace the European Common Aviation Area, there could be fewer airlines flying (and so less competition and higher fares) on many routes. And that will be to the detriment not only of British passengers, but European ones as well.