The past couple of years have been very challenging for cargo in Belgium. The buyout of TNT Express by FedEx in April 2015, together with the traffic rights granted by Ms. Galant to Ethiopian Airlines and the illegal US operations in Europe have been putting a lot of pressure on cargo operations in Belgium. Below a little recap of the facts and BeCA’s demands.

Ethiopian Airlines: Unfair competition against ASLB

• On 12 February 2016, Ms. Galant granted traffic rights to Ethiopian airlines, despite BeCA warning her that it would be damaging to Belgian cargo in 2 letters.
• At the time, the government’s justification for granting those rights was that it was supposed to create over 400 jobs – a figure that was based on a questionable study.
• BeCA insisted that letting ETH in would threaten Belgian cargo and was de facto unfair competition, although the government was claiming that ETH was not competing with any Belgium-based airline.
• Almost a year later, we can only but witness that we were right: the jobs promised have not been created: less than 10 jobs in Liège; ETH is now operating 28 weekly flights in 5th freedom from Belgian airports and have been granted rights to fly to TNT Airways destinations; and, following a recent analysis, BeCA now have proofs that they are operating beyond the rights granted in the memorandum.
• For BeCA, this is unacceptable. In a letter to Mr. Bellot, on 13 December 2016, BeCA repeated its concerns and urged him to review the terms of the agreement, as it hampers any potential attempt by ASLB to develop activities on the general cargo market.

FedEx’s and UPS illegal operations in Europe

• In 2012, BeCA demonstrated that UPS and FedEx were conducting on a daily basis an all cargo service between European countries, a practice that is forbidden under the EU-US Open Skies agreement.
• BeCA was also informed that since 2011, FedEx has based around 90 pilots in Cologne. According to a German-US agreement, the US pilots can remain based there for maximum 5 years without paying any social taxes in Germany. However, we discovered that those pilots do not operate from Cologne, but from CDG, breaking social security laws.
• The European Commission and the French authorities have been informed of the situation. We can expect some returns (good or bad) in the following months.
• Given these serious irregularities (see our article in our December 2015 Cockpit Flash), we urge the EU institutions to act and stop them now, to ensure fair competition and protection of European pilots’ jobs over US pilots.

TNT Airways becomes ASL Airlines Belgium: what future in this context?

In December 2015, TNT pilots reached an agreement with their management, which ensured that all pilots’ jobs will be protected. With the actual phase-out of the 3 B777, ASLB management confirmed its intention to fully implement the agreement and claims it is convinced of its ability to redeploy all B777 pilots.

However, considering the above, the future of the long haul operations remains uncertain. BeCA has been working closely with unions, ECA and IFALPA and has been lobbying our authorities intensively to find a solution at European and Belgian levels. On ETH, we have been sending out several letters to the Transport Minister and we are going to follow up and monitor his decision. Regarding FedEx’s operations in CDG and Cologne, we are in close contact with our French and German counterparts who will hopefully act with us.

The coming months will be decisive for the future of ASLB and its pilots. BeCA and its members will therefore need to double our efforts in order to protect our jobs and guarantee a future to the cargo activity in Belgium. We will keep you posted on BeCA’s future actions.