International Agreements and Organizations — Page 35, Lesson 65

Let’s pick this up right where the material gets practical. We’re looking at how the Chicago Convention’s rules get adapted for specific regions, and then at the two supplementary agreements that handle commercial rights. First, Regional Supplementary Procedures. The document is Doc 7030/4. Think of it as the book of regional tweaks. The worldwide procedures — the global standards — are fine for most places, but sometimes a specific geographic region needs something different. When a Regional Air Navigation Meeting decides that a navigational procedure differing from the worldwide one is necessary for its region, that procedure gets written into the relevant region section of Doc 7030/4. Those are the Regional Supplementary Procedures, abbreviated SUPPS. The key point: like the PANS — the Procedures for Air Navigation Services — SUPPS are approved by the Council of ICAO, but they’re approved only for regional use. So they’re not global; they’re locked to that region’s section of the document. Now, the bigger picture — the other international agreements. The Chicago Convention cared a lot about exchanging commercial rights in international civil aviation. But the original 52 states couldn’t reach a single agreement that satisfied everyone. So the conference set up two supplementary agreements. The first is the International Air Services Transit Agreement. It gives aircraft of any participating state the right to fly over the territory of any other participating state, and to land there for technical reasons — think fuel stops, maintenance, not picking up passengers. The second is the International Air Transport Agreement. Among other things, it provides for the carriage of traffic — that’s passengers, mail and cargo — between the State of Registration of the aircraft and any other signatory state. So the first handles transit; the second handles actual commercial carriage. That leads us to the Freedoms of the Air. The Transit Agreement established two technical freedoms, known as the first and second freedoms. Here’s the precise definition of ‘freedom’ in this context: it’s the privilege conferred by virtue of signatory status to a bilateral agreement. So a freedom isn’t a right you have automatically; it’s a privilege you get because your state is a signatory to a bilateral agreement. Because both agreements require bilateral understandings between the parties, ICAO produced the ‘Chicago Standard Form for Bilateral Agreement for Regular Air Transport’. That form is based on the definitions of the Freedoms of the Air as defined in the Transit and Transport Agreements. And here’s the practical bit for operations: for general aviation and non-scheduled commercial operations, the way a flight gives notification that it’s exercising the privileges of the appropriate freedoms is by filing an international flight plan. That filing is the notification mechanism. Finally, the Technical Freedoms — these comprise the first two freedoms, and they were established through the International Air Services Transit Agreement. So the technical freedoms are the transit-related ones: overflight and technical landing. The commercial freedoms — the third, fourth, fifth and beyond — come from the Transport Agreement side, which we’ll get into next.