Galery

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What are the first changes that have to make in the organization?

Until now, one office - the Office for Civil Aviation, performs many services in order to get the final product. I will give a simple example – in order to bring you the finished coffee – one person supplies the coffee, other one makes it and a third person serves it to you - all these people cost some money. Currently their price is out of control, i.e. the Office does not know how much costs the person who makes coffee. The European Union wants to know what are the factors that determine the price for the flight of aircraft over Greece. For example, if an aircraft departs from Sofia to Cyprus and is flying over Greece, it pays Greece a certain amount for each mile traveled, which is currently far out of control. EU wants to know what services are available, what is their price and finally why do you want to be paid for example 30 euros per mile?! So now we have to make an estimation of the services and to find out if there is an additional cost when setting the final amount. The first thing they want to do is to find out what the prices are, how much is paid for what in order to make statements and then save, but always one country can be more expensive than another one.

Since when have you started with the protests and what was the initial cause?

Requests are always financial. Our main demand is to not belong to the state sector and as it is abroad to be created an organization, a company that will manage the fees of flights by an administrator who will be state employee. We are talking about a company that will have only one shareholder - the state, but we will not fall under the state accounts because there huge delays and restrictions. Currently, to get a cup from the State I must invite tenders. And then wait for two years to deliver the cup and ultimately it is not worth buying it because you don’t need it any longer. We are, however, talking about equipment – about radars, about frequencies which technologies are developing and then in two or three years of use are already old. Money coming from Europe and from the fees for flights should go for investments in this area - to improve the standard of services, for the security, for speeding up traffic by reducing delays.

When will the Ministry sign the agreement for cooperation between these four countries?

On 31.12.2011 Greece will have to say whether it will participate in this program.

It seems to me that you are not sure whether you will participate. You as the dispatchers union, do you agree with this contract?

As an idea it is good, but we are far behind with the organization and we do not know what will happen with the issues of employment, wages, human resources, recruitment, training. These issues have not yet been discussed. We do not have enough people with whom to participate in this program. Italians for example participate in this program with eight subcommittees, involving 80 people. In Greece, in these committees on a permanent position are employed 7-8 people. We do not participate fully, decisions are taken which we are not prepared to discuss. If we know early what he agenda will be we might be able to prepare - to take the opinion of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of National Defence, the Office for Civil Aviation, the unions - if one has not gone through this to ask them for their opinion on a given proposal one can not fully participate in the dialogue. We do not have any support neither in terms of legal advice nor in terms of finances, nor we have cooperation between the ministries. Because in our work are involved three ministries, and until recently, the Ministry of Defence refused to attend meetings. The question of the organization has major consequences for the issue of security. The more things you can predict, the greater is the security. This cooperation can help us get organized, which will be good for us because it will speed up the reforms.

Will this affect the prices of flights?

We live in capitalism. Around the year 2000 the EU Commissioner for Transport and Energy Loyola de Palacio went to America and saw that the price of air transport services was 50% lower than in Europe. The reason is that Americans have one service - and the same rules that apply both in Denver and in Sinsinatai, Ohio, Tennessee. And when she returned to Europe, she said we would do the same. Through the organization the price of services will decrease and following the logic we should have a reduction in the cost of transport. But because we live in capitalism, with the price reduction it does not mean that the selling price of the product will also drop. In capitalism, the goal is profit. This is where the state should intervene and set for the companies a certain percentage of profit on top of the cost of production. In Greece there is no price control. These rules should fix problems of this type.

How far have your negotiations with the Ministry of Transport reached?