KLM was one of the four founding members of AEA and 2008 will be the eighth year the airline has held the chair, a record unsurpassed by any other AEA member. Peter Hartman succeeded Leo van Wijk at the helm of KLM in 2007, crowning a career with the airline which began in 1973 and has encompassed senior posts in a broad range of the airline’s activities, from Engineering & Maintenance to Personnel, from Ground Operations to Customer Services.

Mr Hartman will guide AEA through a year in which many challenges will confront the industry. The business environment is expected to become tougher as the global economy cools down, while cost pressures persist all along the aviation value chain. Two value chain items in particular will command Mr Hartman’s attention. “After a long period in which AEA’s persistent calls for regulatory intervention in the airport sector went unheeded”, he said, “we were happy to see the European Commission took our arguments in this respect seriously and launched a regulatory intervention in the airport sector in the form of the Commission’s Airport Package”.

“The Airport Package has been accurately described as an important first step, but we must continue to press for further liberalisation of ground handling, a proper economic regulation of airport charges and – in particular – a political commitment to head off the capacity crunch which threatens to strangle the development of Europe’s hub airports, jeopardising their global competitiveness and damaging the airlines’ progress in limiting their environmental impact”.

Even more important for his chairmanship, said Peter Hartman, was achieving progress in 2008 towards transforming European air traffic management into the Single European Sky. “In April, it will be four years since we saw the enactment of the first phase of Single Sky legislation, and it is about time we started seeing some of the massive potential improvements that the programme has to offer. The current patchwork of European ATM imposes huge penalties on the airlines and their Association of European Airlines passengers in terms of cost and delay, and on the environment in terms of unnecessary emissions”.

“The second phase of the project will trigger a period of intense activity for AEA in 2008, as we seek to ensure that the vision of the Single Sky is not compromised by intransigence or inertia on the part of the National States”.

Mr Hartman welcomed AEA’s two new member airlines from the Ukraine, Aerosvit and Ukraine International, expanding the horizons of AEA and bringing an exciting new dimension to the scope of the Association. He also welcomed to the AEA Presidents’ Committee – the supervisory board of the association – Alfred Oetsch of Austrian and Philippe Vander Putten of Brussels Airlines, who will join Fernando Conte of Iberia, Jean-Cyril Spinetta of Air France, Willie Walsh of British Airways, Ivan Misetic of Croatia Airlines, Jukka Hienonen of Finnair, Wolfgang Mayrhuber of Lufthansa, Mats Jansson of SAS, Fernando Pinto of TAP Portugal and Steve Ridgway of Virgin Atlantic Airways.