Europe

British airlines forced to fly planes to US for repairs because of Brexit rules

Operators complain work is slower and higher costs will mean increased prices for consumers

British airlines are being forced to fly planes to the United States for slower and more expensive repairs instead of Europe because of Brexit rules.

The UK and EU, despite having largely identical safety rules, have two separate licensing systems for maintenance facilities. Following a two-year post-Brexit grace period which ended in 2023, any UK-registered aircraft cannot be legally repaired at EU-licensed facilities.

Now British companies have been flying their planes thousands of miles across the Atlantic to the US, which has a mutual recognition agreement for aviation engineering with the UK.

Cargo airline One Air, which operates out of the East Midlands importing electronic goods, has two Boeing 747s, which need one basic check every three months and a detailed check every two years.

One Air said a straightforward maintenance check in Germany would take a week and cost about £164,000. In the US, it takes a fortnight and costs £203,000.

Detailed maintenance takes 27 days turnaround at a cost of £1.25 million at a German facility. In the US, it takes 41 days at a cost of £1.7 million. Extra cost burden is passed on

Chris Hope, One Air’s chief operating officer, said: “It creates a bigger running cost that effectively gets passed through to the consumer as an extra cost burden that we see as potentially unnecessary.”

He added that costs were driven up because components for the planes also had to be UK-approved, and were sourced from the US as a result.

EU facilities can apply for separate UK licences, but are unlikely to do so given the additional cost and red tape.

The UK Government wants a deal with Brussels on the mutual recognition of professional qualifications as part of its push for closer ties with Europe, but EU officials have poured cold water on those hopes.

They said they had already rejected demands for a similar agreement from the Tory government during the 2020 Brexit trade negotiations because it “at the time, it was not considered in the EU’s interest”.

A mutual recognition agreement would mean EU engineers could service British aircraft, and vice versa, as they did when all were under one licensing system before the UK left the EU and its European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA).

An EU official warned Britain would have to become a rule taker if it wanted to rejoin EASA as an associate member.

“This is a deliberate choice of the UK, and does not trigger the need for the EU to engage in a discussion of ‘recognition’ of UK certificates,” one official told The Telegraph. ‘In interests of all to remove this burden’

A spokesman for the Airlines UK trade body said it had felt the effects of a Brexit trade deal which Sir Keir Starmer has described as “botched”.

“It would be in the interests of all parties across the UK and EU to remove this burden and reintroduce mutual recognition of pilot and engineer licences,” he said.

Naomi Smith, the chief executive of Best for Britain, which campaigns for closer EU-UK ties, said: “This is just one example from one industry of how divergence from our largest market and closest neighbours is increasing costs for businesses and inevitably consumers.”

Boeing has predicted that globally there will need to be 716,000 new maintenance technicians, and 674,000 new pilots, to meet demand over the next two decades. This shortage will be exacerbated without a reciprocal licensing deal between the UK and EU, industry sources said.