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Civil Aviation (Consumer Protection and Regulatory Reform) Bill [HL]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 60 to 62; I express a specific concern in my Amendment 62. I thought that I knew about the technology in this debate until I decided to brush up on it yesterday; I have spent most of my working hours since then getting up to date, to some extent.

The essence of the technology, which would allow a much more holistic review of airspace use, is that it is dependent not on aids on the ground but on global positioning systems. That gives great benefits, in terms of what it does for aviation, but I put it to the Committee that it also gives great benefits to those who are concerned about the environmental impact. If your route does not fit with that bit of society and there is a route that can fit with that bit of society, then, with the overarching technology, it can be changed. Up to this point, changing where aeroplanes go close to the ground has been totally dominated by the ground-based aids that they use to land.

The essence of my amendment—as an ex-BALPA shop steward, I thought that I had better represent my old team—is to get pilots involved in this consultation. They are going to face dramatic differences. One of the first things that I would say relates to the point that the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, made the other day, which is that the planes can fly themselves. Normally, you have to drag the plane into the air then tell it to fly itself, and, when you get to the end, you actually have to make a few decisions. It is a very good theory; hopefully, when you press “flight nav” or something like that, that will happen.

The problem facing the modern pilot is that one of their most important tasks is to cope when there are system failures. There will be system failures. There are no big computer systems in the world that do not have system failures, as we all know to our cost. The problem is that the level of knowledge needed by the

operative to cope with a system failure is very large but it is not often practised. It will, I am sure, follow the pilot’s standard of continuous checking. I have never flown an airplane with its engine on fire, but, when I was an airline pilot, I flew a plane with its engine on fire many times in a simulator. It was dramatic and great fun, but the whole essence here is that the systems delivering this will intrinsically and inevitably have failure modes early on. The crew are there to look after that, among all the other safety issues that they have to care about.

All the literature on the impact on pilots of a very different system says that it will require if not an almost completely new licence then certainly a substantial licence endorsement to equip pilots to look after these systems. How can their views and their wisdom be taken into account? They are the only people who can envisage the situation, together with a very dramatic change in standards.

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Broadly speaking, if you are flying a jet airliner, you do not see any other aeroplanes because the systems keep you that far apart. These new systems are designed to let aeroplanes fly safely but nevertheless much closer to one another. That is a key area of safety concern. We have to get right the interface between the human beings on board an aeroplane, the aeroplane and the routers, and only pilots can have that input. There will be some differences in the worlds of air traffic controllers and so on but, broadly speaking, their loads will be lightened because the routings of the aeroplanes will have been predetermined in setting up the system.

I am told that BALPA represents 85% of all pilots, so it is a useful shorthand. I am sure that advisers to the Minister will tell him that it is inadvisable to include a specific group, but I am sure we can find some words. Pilots need to be in that consultation. I take the point of the value of a short consultation but, inevitably, because this will be so new, it will affect people on the ground in different ways, so there must also be some capability for ongoing consultation so that responsible bodies with the power to change things have to listen to users, people on the ground and operators.