Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-03-29-Speech-3-088"
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"en.20000329.6.3-088"2
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".
Mr President, first of all I wish to thank all of you for your speeches and especially the Portuguese Minister for Transport, the President-in-Office of the Council. Yesterday we discussed this matter and I received the full support of the Council, for which I would like to publicly express my gratitude.
Ladies and gentlemen, it should be made abundantly clear that our ambition must not be to conform to the ‘Hushkits’ Regulation, to the regulation on silencers. The regulation on silencers means nothing more than implementing the noise levels of 1978 and we are in the year 2000. We must go further. We must reach an agreement within the ICAO, and to achieve this, the support and cooperation of the United States is essential. The United States should not be the only country with which we cooperate, but we certainly must cooperate with the United States and with the United States in particular.
We must move beyond what has been reactive behaviour, that is to say, behaviour that has worked on the action-reaction principle, and move towards an approach which is ambitious and which looks to the future. In this respect, there are two issues we should be discussing: in domestic terms, we must talk about the communication on air transport and the environment which Minister Coelho referred to, which we discussed yesterday in Council and which involves many other things, apart from simply noise, such as emissions, and a series of other issues. With regard to the United States, we must try to find a form of cooperation that goes much further than current cooperation within the ICAO.
We must try to create a common transatlantic aviation area which is a regional area in which we can achieve greater integration of the markets on each side of the Atlantic, because it is a geographical area with similar levels of development and which has the highest level of air traffic in the world. Clearly, the tensions and confrontations involving the ‘Hushkits’ issue hinder this type of action. We must therefore try to reach an agreement which will allow us to overcome the current situation of conflict.
I wish to make it very clear that the regulation on silencers comes into force on 4 May for European airline companies. There is nothing more to say about this. We have proposed to the Americans that, if they consider the definition of ‘bypass ratio’ to be a form of discrimination – and we think it is not – that we try to find a different definition. However, the United States have not wanted to enter into this type of discussion.
The regulation comes into force for European airlines on 4 May. Nevertheless, ladies and gentlemen, if we could reach an agreement with the United States to act jointly, in order to obtain lower levels and greater requirements in terms of aircraft noise emission, I would be prepared to make a proposal to this Parliament and the Council to suspend the provisions of the current regulation with regard to third countries.
As Mr Sterckx has said, we must overcome any mutual distrust, we must overcome situations of confrontation and I believe that a gesture of this type, if backed on the American side not only by this commitment but also by the withdrawal, or even suspension, of Article 84 of the ICAO Convention, would be valuable if, in exchange, we manage to move forward together to achieve better international standards which will also be applied here in Europe, and which will allow us to go much further than we can go with this regulation on silencers at the moment.
That is all. Thank you very much, Mr President. I would like to thank you once again for your support and I would like to thank the President-in-Office of the Council on Transport and the Council on Transport as a whole for the answer they gave me yesterday."@en1
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