AIBU or are we all going to be trapped in the UK from next March?

[Clarissalarissa]

So, Ryanair and Thomas Cook are inserting clauses in their booking terms to say that if your flight abroad doesn't go ahead because of Brexit that's your problem. No doubt others will follow. If any deal is ever done, to allow planes to fly, it is bound to be a lot more expensive than it is now.

Is everyone planning many years of UK-only holidaying?

Can we remain in the open skies agreement and continue with the rules and regulations of it if we are leaving the EU , who decides if we stay in or not ?

www.ft.com/content/9461157c-1f97-11e8-9efc-0cd3483b8b80

Reminds me of all the Millennium Bug clauses I had to sign as everyone was convinced the world was going to come to a grinding halt. I can understand that contracts with companies may need to change or need renegotiating after Brexit, I suspect that airlines won't want to lose fares either.

We need a head desk emoji

Reminds me of all the Millennium Bug clauses I had to sign as everyone was convinced the world was going to come to a grinding halt

Only the people who didn't understand the issue thought that. though plenty of others who also didn't thought it was all hysteria.

In reality there was an actual problem, and a lot of clever people spent a lot of time fixing it and working on it and making it all ok, so you didn't have to worry about it.
Unfortunately instead of being grateful to them you laughed instead, and now we don't have enough clever people working hard on the very real problems of Brexit, we just have a lot more people laughing and shouting about hysteria.

Reminds me of all the Millennium Bug clauses I had to sign as everyone was convinced the world was going to come to a grinding halt

Ah yeah, why not pluck out any incident from history and make a comparison?

Reminds me of the weather forecast last week: they said it would snow and it did.

Reminds me of the seventies: they said there'd be strikes and there was.

Reminds me of the fall of Eastern Europe: they said they'd come under soviet control and they did.

Don't you realise how just picking one random event from history - that has nothing to do with the subject in hand- makes you look poorly informed?

Availability of visas and availability of flights are two completely separate issues.

The original question was - will there still be flights abroad after Brexit in March 2019?

The simple answer is - IF there is no new Open Skies Agreement, then there will be no flights from the UK to the EU, nor to anywhere else covered by Open Skies (which includes the USA) nor to anywhere that involves flying over the airspace of any EU country (e.g. to Israel or Turkey).

Whether or not you believe that this will actually happen is entirely speculation and dependent on how well you believe the EU-UK negotiations are going to proceed. Businesses are clearly sufficiently concerned to add a 'Brexit clause' into their Ts&Cs - this from Inghams' 2019 ski website:

Brexit and its consequences: ...
At present, the Changes in Law that we consider most likely to occur and, in turn, affect your chosen arrangements are as follows:
...
b) A potential inability for British airlines to operate flights into / out of the European Union and , conversely, an inability for European airlines to operate into / out of the United Kingdom. The result of this may be that we are unable to provide you either with the flights that you have booked or indeed any replacement flights.

It's employment rights and human rights - our prime minister has indicated that she would like to remove all of these.

I'm no fan of TM (and I have never and would never vote Tory) but this is scaremongering arse. TM was frustrated with the way the Human Rights lawyers were stopping her sending captain hook back to Jordan - not the same thing at all.

The original question was - will there still be flights abroad after Brexit in March 2019?

And the answer is an unequivocal yes of course. Far too many vested interests (including Airlines) for this not to happen.

Bit more to it than that, she wants rid of huge sections of human rights laws.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/07/theresa-may-human-rights-european-charter-terrorists

Can we remain in the open skies agreement and continue with the rules and regulations of it if we are leaving the EU , who decides if we stay in or not ?

Mrs May continues to reiterate that the UK will leave the EU on 29th March 2019. In doing so, the UK in effect tears up over 750 Treaties and Agreements (including Open Skies) that it is party to through membership of the EU and therefore has none of these Agreements in place the day after Brexit unless a new replacement Agreements have been put in place. Who decides the Terms of these Agreements? - the other parties, who could be the EU, the USA or any other of the 140+ countries in the world. For example, the USA has already offered a replacement for the current UK-USA part of Open Skies. The Terms were far poorer than the current Agreement and slanted in favour of the USA.

I thought May's latest stance was that she would like to opt into the Open Skies agreement, but one problem is, it's not an agreement which is open to third countries. I imagine she hopes they will rewrite the rules especially for her, but if so, perhaps dialling back on the rhetoric about being difficult, rows of the summer, hostile environments for foreigners and not giving clear answers about EU citizens rights in this country, wasn't a good idea.

Bit more to it than that, she wants rid of huge sections of human rights laws. Wanted to. In 2017, according to the Granuiad. and the worker's rights?

BTW - although I understand the OP is worried about their job, it really wouldn't hurt the planet if we stopped flying everywhere quite so much.

Clarissa, I'm glad someone else has raised this. We usually book for summer next year when places become available at Easter the previous year. We're either doing a caravan holiday in the UK in July 2019 or a Greek island in October 2019. With a free child place and one under-2, they work out at about the same cost. No idea yet which we'll be going for, but we couldn't afford to lose the money if the October holiday was booked and didn't go ahead. I presume travel insurance would start to include a clause to exclude such cancellations in the same way as insurance companies wouldn't want to be so out of pocket.

Wanted to. In 2017, according to the Granuiad. and the worker's rights?

Wanted to, and now easily can do, with Brexit. Aren't you worried? You should be.

It might be beneficial if we stopped the Just In Time supply chains, and e.g. stopped moving parts of cars to and fro across Europe as the car is built, but, as always, someone has got to start thinking hard about setting up the new systems, and start now. Common sense ought to dictate that these things don't get done overnight. There seems to be a large dearth of common sense in this Government.

Wanted to, and now easily can do, with Brexit. Aren't you worried? You should be.

Thanks for telling me what to worry about - how kind.

I am worried about any threat to human rights. In fact, it's a complex relationship not directly related to Brexit.

Lucky many parliamentarians including David Davies are opposed -as the Grauniad article points out.

I notice no-one's had anything to say about worker's rights.

No idea yet which we'll be going for, but we couldn't afford to lose the money if the October holiday was booked and didn't go ahead.

Given that Spain, Italy and Greece would basically be screwed if they had no UK visitors, there's no way the doomsday scenario will happen. It's all just a big game of brinksmanship, like most negotiations, but when the time comes, there WILL be flights to/from the UK. It's in no one's interest to be any other way.

It might be beneficial if we stopped the Just In Time supply chains, and e.g. stopped moving parts of cars to and fro across Europe as the car is built,

Is much of this airfrieght?

OP was talking about people, and so am I. There is no need and no environmental justification for so many of us to be flying so often.

We need a head desk emoji - that poor desk, my jaw keeps hitting it too.

This is from a professional pilots' forum 6 days ago:

"As most of you have deduced the issue here is that as of 1 April 2019 the UK will no longer be included in the existing US-EU 'Open Skies' Agreement. Norway is included in this as a specifically named country, same with Iceland. The UK is only included as a member of the EU. One potential option would have been to make a change to have the UK included in a manner similar to Norway. However, this would require all three of the following to be true

1. The UK asks to be included in this manner
2. The EU agrees
3. The US agrees

Clearly at least one of the above has not happened.

Without this a new agreement must be reached or the freedoms that allow US and UK carriers to fly between each others countries will expire at Midnight on 1 April 2019. Now the US and UK have had early talks on entering into their own agreement. However, the US is insisting on the ownership and control clause plus several other things. The ownership and control clause is part of the US-EU agreement, so there is no difference here. Some of the other terms are clearly less advantageous than the ones in the existing agreement.

The problem for the UK is that the ownership and control clause becomes critical. Under the EU agreement the airlines must be owned and controlled by either US or EU (and named country) entities. This is how IAG, AF/KL, Lufthansa, Norwegian, etc groups can operate from anywhere in the EU to the US. It is also what allows Branson to sell his 31% to AF/KL but could not sell 1% more to DL.

As Nighthawk points out the entanglement of all UK airlines with the EU is the real problem. It is also not as simple as moving ownership about. Control also matters. The US definition is generally around 25% of voting shares if you are the largest shareholder. For example, Branson could not have more than 25% of Virgin America voting shares if there were no larger US shareholders than him, and his total shareholding could not have been more than 49%. The US tends to be quite ruthless about this. What does this mean

1. For BA to qualify it would probably have to be completely divested from IAG, that is even 25% shareholding by IAG might still be too much as Madrid would not be allowed to control the operations of BA
2. TUI UK will leave the Orlando market
3. Norwegian will not be able to continue operating out of the UK at all
4. Virgin has the lease amount of change. All that has to happen is they create a new, US registered airline that is 51% owned by DL and 49% by Branson and AF/KL, or better yet ~24.5% by each to keep under the US 25% threshold. This would then be allowed to operate between the UK and US. The rest of VS could operate to other locations. This is similar to what VS already does for a few Caribbean routes.
5. Thomas Cook is an interesting question. They are currently UK controlled, but have significant EU operations. Condor for example. They will either have to transfer to EU control, which bind TCX UK, or sell off Condor and their other European Airlines. The status quo will not allow both TCX and Condor to continue operating to the US.

And this is not the worst case scenario. There is still the no agreement in principle by Oct-Dec timeframe. That could be catastrophic."

ukandeu.ac.uk/brexit-workers-rights-and-how-to-protect-them/

And you could read this:

www.irishtimes.com/business/transport-and-tourism/uk-us-open-skies-talks-hit-brexit-turbulence-1.3415499

If you want to be informed, there's a whole world of information out there. But then, I'm a journalist so it's easier for me [eyeroll].

Why will those countries be screwed?
Are you seriously suggesting Brits are their sole tourists?

@Cupofteaandtoilet back in 2010-2012 I highlighted what was happening with welfare reform, the move to PIP and how it would disproportionately affect disabled people. How they would lose their motability cars and be subject to hate crime and abuse.

I was called a socialist frother.

Guess what happened? People have died from these policies.

What I'm trying to say is that they won't listen. They never do.

Cupofteaandtoilet

What exactly is you point, in relation to the OP? (once you have finished scoffing at others).

Are you saying we will or will not all have to stop leaving these islands by air as the OP suggests? Or just trying to impress us with the fact you can find things like pprune (I have been a member for several years) on the internet?