EU Court Set to Rule on Business Aviation's Sustainability Status

The European business aviation community may have to wait until September to learn whether the European Union General Court considers the industry to be “an environmentally sustainable economic activity.” That is what is at stake in a case filed by Dassault Aviation and the EBAA to challenge the European Commission’s exclusion of the sector from its EU Taxonomy in a move the plaintiffs say is discriminatory and makes it harder to invest in decarbonization efforts.

Judges in Luxembourg started hearing the case on February 10, and this process is expected to run for up to six months. EBAA is determined to reverse the Commission’s ruling to avoid a precedent in which one part of the aviation industry can be—in the words of the group’s director of public affairs and communications, Róman Kok—“carved out” and treated as “sacrificial lambs.”

Attorneys Jacques Derenne and Dimitris Vallindas, with EBAA’s law firm Sheppard, appeared at the group’s members conference near Brussels on March 19. They spelled out the dangers of business aviation remaining outside the EU Taxonomy, which is widely used in the finance sector to determine activities that are deemed worthy of investment and funding.

Vallindas explained that the Commission views business aviation as mainly being used for leisure travel and that such trips could easily be replaced with other modes of transport. He and his colleague are disputing this contention and other points that it considers “legally erroneous.”

The lawyers accused the Commission of failing to accept that the majority of Europe’s airports have no scheduled airline services. They have pushed back hard on the notion that business aviation is not predominantly used for business purposes, giving the example of Dassault Falcon aircraft ordered by the French Navy for “public interest” missions such as maritime patrol.

“Because they insisted so much on the alleged leisure objective, we thought it totally right to tell them that it’s actually commercial aviation which is used mostly for leisure purposes,” Vallindas said. “If it was the main reason to exclude business aviation, it should also work against commercial aviation.”