Based on Martin’s previous posts I understand this will not be possible until some backend changes are implemented but I’m wondering whether eventually we may see EU traffic rights overhauled to become more realistic.
Specifically, flights between EU and third countries are not modeled well. In real world, any EU airline should be considered domestic in any member state. In practice, where bilateral agreements are in place, member states tend to be “protective” of their “own” airlines (kinda illegal but it is what it is), but still some such services exist.
It’s really hard to play the game in EU bases because while you can have comprehensive EU network, any base outside your home state is limited to intra-EU flights. This is especially problematic if you’re based in a small state with only one large airport, which then effectively limits your ability to grow the airline through other hubs.
I would propose two solutions:
Idealistic: Based on the law, EU acts like a single country, EU airlines can operate any route between EU and third countries.
Realistic: Implement the real-world protectionism. Airline can run flights between EU and any country EU has open skies agreement with (e.g. the US), hence no government approval is needed. Additionally, if an EU airline establishes a subsidiary in another EU state, that subsidiary will not inherit traffic rights from the holding but rather will have traffic rights based on its base location (modelling European concept of airline groups, e.g. Lufthansa owning Austrian and Austrian thus enjoying the “protectionism” in Austria).
The EU treaty will remain as is, meaning 8th/9th freedom for all members. Everything else would have to be covered by additional trilateral treaties. The roadmap item for this is Support for “asymmetric” treaties
So no change where bilaterals are concerned rather than open skies treaties (some destinations in Caucasus, Africa, and most of longhaul)? This makes the bases in small EU states very unattractive
It’s impossible to “realistically” map all bilateral aviation treaties. And playing AS from a small country (EU or non-EU) has always been more of a challenge than in - say - China or the US.
Long-term I could envision a feature where one has to apply for traffic rights in one way or another, but I feel like it would be hard to get this to work fairly in regular game worlds. For exclusive game worlds it might be interesting, though.
But my proposal is to not map all bilaterals and do this on case by case basis - that’s not done for airline’s home country either. In practice there’s no bilateral between say Estonia and North Korea but Estonian airlines can fly to NK in AWS.
I’m suggesting that an EU airline should be considered domestic across the EU (because that’s the law in real life - and many airlines use it, even without openskies) or at least be able to open subsidiaries considered domestic in another EU state. Under the AWS ruleset, airlines such as Austrian, Swiss or even KLM would be impossible to exist.
Unless there’s a political restriction, every pair of nations is possible
Will a flight from Estonia to NK carry passengers? Only if it’s done by an estonian or north korean airline
That is not the law. All the examples you mentioned require case-by-case agreements among all the countries involved. The only de facto standard worldwide is that an airline may fly from its home country to another one. But even that effectively requires the political agreement on both sides and is often restricted. Frequencies and capacities between India and Germany are tightly regulated, for example.
Of course. I used that as an example of AirlineSim already allowing routes where no bilaterals exist in real life, because Martin seemed to understand my proposal as a suggestion to model every single bilateral on the planet, which I agree would be impossible and also kinda nonsensical.
Airlinesim already presumes all bilaterals between airline’s headquarters and other countries to exist. I’m merely suggesting that for EU airlines, the entire EU should be their headquarters (or at least they should be able to have a localised subsidiary).
LOT used to run a network of longhauls out of Budapest in the past, even on routes with no openskies despite being a Polish airline. Swiss runs a vast longhaul network out of Zurich despite being owned by German “holding”. Ryanair runs a bunch of small non-EU shorthauls. All these examples exist because EU is a single market for aviation, yet the game treats it as 27 different markets with an internal openskies agreement.
I understand how bilaterals work. But again, this is already not simulated in the game.
The law is that all EU airlines should be treated equally anywhere in the EU. When Germany and India allocate some frequencies to the German side of the bilateral, both Lufthansa and for example LOT or KLM could apply for utilisation of these frequencies and legally they should all get fair access to them. (In reality, DE is very protective of Lufthansa but that’s another topic.) Most bilaterals explicitly mention that the allocation for the European side of the deal can be used by any EU (EEA) airline because such protectionism for your own carriers is essentially illegal. So even though some may do it, no one admits it
Some of the LO’s routes out of BUD used this in the past (I believe South Korea was among them). Hungary had a bunch of bilaterals because longhaul airlines wanted to fly to BUD, but the Hungarian allocation was unused due to lack of longhaul airlines in Hungary. One day LO came and applied to be the operator for this allocation and got it granted without the treaty needing a change because they are considered a domestic carrier in Hungary. EU is one market for the purpose of traffic rights treaties.
Turns out we already have a court ruling on this matter and it agrees with my interpretation of the law:
In November 2002, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) found that if an Air Services Agreement (ASA) between an EU Member State and a third country permits only the designation of airlines which are owned and controlled by nationals of that signatory EU Member State, such designation is discriminatory and is in breach of EU law. Consequently, every EU Member State is required to grant equal market access for routes to destinations outside the EU to any EU carrier with an establishment in its territory. The ASAs between EU Member States and third countries must therefore be amended to reflect this legal requirement.
I think this idea is going down the rabbit hole a little bit. I do think we have to consider what’s feasible while also keeping gameplay somewhat balanced.
After we want to encourage an active player base. If we implemented this then you would see a small monopoly of airlines like u see in Europe today. How many European airlines have failed over the last 15 yrs & yet no new airlines have taken up the mantlet?
As a result u would limit the sustainability of AS, which would be bad for everyone in the long term.
The main problem with replicating the real world entirely means you also replicate how hostile the aviation industry is. Plus if we’re just going to go like for like then we all may as well just put in the work to finance & apply for our own AOC & all the other prerequisites to start ur own airline & we could make actual real wealth & retire early
It could be an exclusive game world idea that’s optional but I don’t think it would be a sensible choice for AS official game worlds.
I understand that concern although I personally think it would actually make situation better. In the real world, airlines with a lot of capital swallowed smaller airlines unable to expand due to lack of it. This can’t happen in Airlinesim, so more realistic traffic rights would only encourage more competition - nowadays you just need to dominate one of the few states with plenty of large airports and you own Europe because players from smaller states are unable to grow that much. If someone based in Estonia could also open a proper European network with multiple bases, they would have a chance to become a big player too, leading to a more dynamic market.
That being said, if the conclusion is that implementing proper EU traffic rights would make the game worse, fair enough, it’s a valid argument. But if such traffic rights are not implemented only because Martin believes they don’t exist in the real life, that’s a pity because it’s not true and the current system is actually the one that would not be legal IRL (see the link I posted above).
No, what I am saying is that your examples are hypothetical in that these rules might apply on the EU end but not to the third party of the deal. Yes, in theory, all EU airlines must be treated equally. In practice, the non-EU country dictates the terms. And if they don’t want all EU airlines to fly on a given route on equal terms, there’s no deal. That’s why additional treaties like the US-EU Open Skies exist.
So in practice, I plan on keeping our baseline system of all countries granting up to 4th freedom to each other (exceptions exist, see Israel) and modeling only general trilateral agreement beyond that.
This is simply not the case. If you read the link I posted, all treaties which restrict access to the member state’s own airlines are illegal and had to be revamped. The third country may refuse to allow airlines from other member states but that makes the deal impossible and thus such deal can’t exist in the real world, resulting in no traffic rights at all (which is not modelled on Airlinesim and AFAIK didn’t happen in real life neither). The link above deals with the topic of reworking previous treaties to make them complaint with the EU law.
Each treaty has (at least) two parties and an EU member state can’t enter a deal which favours its own airlines. So either we accept that no traffic rights exist, or that they do exist for airlines from across the EU.
There is nothing realistic about the current setup in the game. It may be a better solution for the game and that’s fair enough but not on the basis of reflecting how the real world traffic rights work.
Formally, you are probably right. But what I am trying to say is that while this might be the de jure state of things, de facto it looks a lot different. Maybe I am not up-to-date enough with real world aviation these days, but to my limited knowledge, the case of a EU airline from one EU country flying to destinations outside of the EU from another EU country are nearly non-existent. Obvious exception being all the airlines that have changed ownership on paper but effectively still operate as the flag carriers they were before. Whatever happens in practice will require the will (and goodwill) of at least three countries, irrespective of the formal requirements.
At the end of day, I figure we will have to agree to disagree on this. Your logical assumption is “ASAs are required in the real world and an EU ASA requires equal treatment for alle EU airlines, hence the EU needs to be treated as a single country”, while my line of argument is “AirlineSim doesn’t model bilateral ASAs to begin with, hence anything that’s not covered by a trilateral agreement will fall back to the AirlineSim default of 4th Freedom”.
