The US is challenging the latest EU regulation on aircraft noise, claiming discrimination, Tina Garrity reports

A controversial regulation(1) prohibiting aircraft fitted with noise suppressing "hushkits" from being registered in the EU entered into force on 4 May this year. Any aircraft not registered before this date, either in the EU or abroad, will be banned from EU airports after 1 April 2002. Those registered abroad will only be allowed in if they have previously been operating within the EU.

The alleged reasoning behind the EU rule is that older aircraft, fitted with hushkits to improve their noise certification, have a noise performance that is significantly worse, mass for mass, than that of modern types of aeroplane certified to the standards of the Convention on International Civil Aviation. The US, which operates a large number of such planes, is furious and has accused the EU of discriminating against US companies, which it is claimed have already lost some $2bn as a result of the EU regulation. At one point the US threatened to ban Concorde in retaliation.

In March of this year it went one step further by making a formal complaint to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a specialised UN agency created in 1944. Europe is the single largest export market for US aerospace producers and US commerce secretary William Daley has said that the regulation which, the US claims, is based on a design rather than a performance standard, cannot be allowed to stand.

It is not just the Americans who are upset. At the ICAO's 32nd Assembly in Montreal(2) in the autumn of 1998, 53 African states supported by states from other regions, expressed similar concerns. Under a previous ICAO resolution, member states had agreed not to introduce their own operating restrictions on certain types of aircraft. It was agreed that any regional or national noise initiative should be discussed and adopted within the framework of the ICAO. The European Union, they said, had flouted that agreement. The EU countered this by supporting arguments put forward by the European Conference on Civil Aviation (ECAC) to the effect that developing new noise certification standards was a long- term solution which did little to address the immediate problem of local noise problems arising from traffic growth, particularly in densely populated regions. The Europeans wanted the ICAO to provide a more flexible framework within which different approaches could be adopted.

One of the problems has been the perceived lack of commitment on the part of the US to developing new noise standards for aircraft. At a Brussels press briefing on 19 April 2000,(3) federal aviation spokesman, David Traynham, was keen to stress that the US was committed to progress. However, in approaching a new noise standard, the US had three basic tenets that it wanted to see emphasised:
1. It needed to be environmentally beneficial to the people living near and around airports and needed to be able to deliver real relief on that front.
2. The standard had to be technically achievable and feasible. The US felt that noise relief would be delayed if what was required was something that still needed to be invented.
3. It must be economically reasonable to those people who have invested billions of dollars in aircraft purchases both in Europe and in the United States and around the world.

When questioned about the US complaint to the ICAO, he said that the US was hoping for EU legislation before 2002 which would suspend or withdraw the offending regulation. The EU has in the past said it would be prepared to consider this in return for an American commitment to a new standard. US officials spent several days in April meeting EU officials, member states representatives and MEPs to discuss a way forward. Nevertheless, they are adamant that the dispute can only be resolved via the ICAO and that any new standard must be developed by consensus within the framework of the ICAO. The European parties at the ICAO have until June or July to file a rebuttal or counter measure to the US complaint. The problem is, that if the dispute goes against the EU, it seemingly could lose its voting rights at the ICAO and thus be unable to vote on any new standards!
Either way, the dispute has served to confirm that achieving effective relief for EU citizens from aircraft noise is going to be a slow and painful process.

References
1. Council Regulation (EC) No. 925/1999. OJ L 115. 04.05.99.
2. ICAO website: www.icao.org
3. US Mission Briefing, 19 April 2000. www.useu.be/issues/noise0419.html