With the creation of a single aviation market within the European Union, the regulatory framework is constantly evolving in the light of new developments in this important sector.
In order to facilitate access to the legislation in force and ease its reading, a European Civil Aviation handbook has been developed. We hope you will find it useful and would be interested in any comments you might have which could help us improving it further.
This handbook is for information only, it does not have legal value, nor affect the legislation currently in force.
Legal warning
This European Civil Aviation Handbook is an informative document which is not legally binding. This presents the advantage of enabling the simultaneous presence of texts of differing nature, thus participating in the structuring of the European aviation law: Regulation, Directives obviously but also Decisions, Case Law and International Agreements.
Should you require accessing the original acts, a hyperlink access is provided for each of acts integrated into this handbook.
Note
The present document amalgamates texts referring to the Community aviation policy into an “informative” Civil Aviation Handbook that can be used in parallel to the existing legislation. This handbook should be seen as a trial for improving the accessibility to the constantly growing aviation legislation. One outcome expected from this initiative is a more homogeneous interpretation of the EU acts.
This Civil Aviation Handbook is more than a simple collection of texts: acts are consolidated, recitals are removed, obsolete provisions are underlined, what is not in force any more is put aside, texts of differing nature dealing with a common subject are brought together… In other words, most obstacles hindering the aviation stakeholders from having a good knowledge of the legislation are removed.
In order to preserve the Handbook’s readability while trying to cover the maximum number of texts, texts of “horizontal nature” or “too technical” are not reproduced here but can be accessed by consulting the “Other related texts” page available every time such texts exist. On these pages the texts are listed and a hyperlink is provided for each act.
Other texts are not integrated into this handbook because they are either obsolete, repealed or due for repeal.
As a consequence the present handbook does not include all the texts cited under Air Transport on the EUR-Lex website. Another noticeable difference lies with the structure of the handbook.
Texts have been organised into three different parts. Part I concerns regulations and directives. Part II deals with decisions and case law as well as competition rules. Finally Part III collects the international agreements. The same thematic structure is used for Part I and Part II in order to allow for rapid correspondence between the two parts.