Open skies agreements and the EU single aviation market: who can fly where?

At the spotters’ hill in Vienna, an Airbus A320 in Ryanair colors taxis past, with a 9H registration from Malta on the fuselage. At Heathrow, a Delta jet from Atlanta lands that wouldn’t have existed there like this before 2008. And across Europe, aircraft with Irish registration take off for routes that never touch Ireland. All of this has the same background: open skies agreements and the EU single aviation market. This article explains how traffic rights between states work, what Europe has made of them and how to recognize the consequences while spotting.

Open skies: the short answer

An open skies agreement is an air transport treaty between states that largely removes the usual limits on routes, frequencies, capacities and prices. The airlines of both sides decide for themselves where, how often and at what price they fly. What usually remains: the ban on domestic flights in the other country and rules on who may own an airline.

The EU single aviation market goes considerably further. Within the EU, there are no longer national airlines in the legal sense but only EU air carriers. Each of them may fly any route between and within the member states and set its prices freely. Through agreements, Norway, Iceland and Switzerland are also part of it.

Why flying needs agreements in the first place

Every state has sovereignty over its airspace. At the Chicago conference in 1944, states wrestled over how open international air traffic should be after the war. The USA wanted markets as free as possible, while many other countries feared the dominance of the big American airlines. The result was a compromise: the Transit Agreement governs the first two freedoms of the air – overflying and technical stopovers – and a second agreement the first five. Broad approval, however, went mainly to the Transit Agreement. The commercial rights, meaning carrying passengers and cargo from A to B, remained a matter of negotiation between each pair of states.

What the individual freedoms mean, from the third (flight to a foreign country) to the ninth (pure cabotage), is explained in detail in the article The freedoms of the air. For this text, it is enough to know: who gets which freedom is set out in an air service agreement.

The Bermuda model: everything precisely regulated

The best-known example of a classic bilateral agreement is the Bermuda Agreement between Great Britain and the USA of 1946, replaced in 1977 by Bermuda II. Such treaties specified which airlines may fly, which airports are served and sometimes also how much capacity is offered. Finally, under Bermuda II, only four airlines were allowed to fly between London Heathrow and the USA: British Airways and Virgin Atlantic on the British side, United and American on the American side. All others had to divert to other London airports.

The idea behind open skies

Open skies turns the principle around. Instead of approving each connection individually, two contracting parties open their markets to each other. Typical components:

• Free choice of routes: Every designated airline may fly between any points of both countries.
• No frequency and capacity limits: How often and with what equipment is flown is decided by the market.
• Free pricing: Fares no longer have to be approved by both governments.
• Beyond rights: Flights beyond the partner country to third countries are often also allowed, the so-called fifth freedom.
• Cooperation allowed: Codeshares and further cooperation between airlines are expressly provided for.

The USA made this policy a program in the early 1990s. The first partner, in 1992, was the Netherlands. For KLM and Northwest Airlines, this was the basis for the first transatlantic partnership exempted from antitrust law, starting in 1993. How such cooperations later became the big alliances is shown in the article Transatlantic joint ventures.

The EU single market: three packages up to cabotage

While the USA proceeded bilaterally, Europe built a common market. That happened step by step in three liberalization packages:

Step	Year	What changed
First package	1987	first relaxations on fares and capacity sharing between states
Second package	1990	further opening on prices and market access
Third package	1992	national airlines become EU air carriers, free route access and free pricing
Full cabotage	April 1997	EU airlines may also serve domestic routes in other member states
Recast	2008	Regulation (EC) No. 1008/2008 consolidates the rules and replaces the third package

Since then, the rule has been: anyone with an operating license from an EU state is an EU airline – regardless of where its aircraft are based. Routes within the EU no longer need a separate permit, with the exception of some connections with public service obligations, such as routes to remote regions.

The key rules of Regulation 1008/2008

The regulation is today the basic law of the European air transport market. For understanding, four points are enough:

• Operating license: An airline needs a valid air operator certificate, solid finances and sufficient insurance. What is behind the AOC is explained in the article AOC and operating license.
• Ownership and control: More than half of the airline must belong to member states or their nationals, and they must actually control the company. The head office is in a member state.
• Free prices, but the final price: Airlines set their fares themselves but must show the final price including all taxes and fees.
• Leasing with limits: Leasing aircraft with crew from non-EU countries is possible only to a limited extent. How such leasing models work is shown in the article Wet lease explained.

What the single market triggered

The opening has fundamentally changed the market. Ryanair had already switched to a low-cost model on the Southwest pattern in 1990. With the single market and cabotage from 1997, the Irish airline could open bases far outside Ireland and serve routes that never touch its home. easyJet started in 1995, Wizz Air followed in 2004. How this business model works in detail is described in the article How low-cost carriers work. Network airlines also benefited: groups such as the Lufthansa Group or the International Airlines Group now bundle airlines from several member states.

How the EU negotiates externally

Until the early 2000s, each member state concluded its agreements with third countries itself. Many of them contained nationality clauses: only German airlines could fly under the German agreement, only Dutch ones under the Dutch agreement. On November 5, 2002, the European Court of Justice ruled in a series of cases against several member states that such clauses are incompatible with EU law. These so-called open skies rulings are regarded as the starting point of a common EU external policy on air transport.

Since then, the EU has followed three paths:

The EU–US agreement in detail

The most important of these agreements was signed in Washington on April 30, 2007, and has applied since March 30, 2008. It replaced the USA’s individual open skies agreements with European states. In 2010, the protocol on the second stage followed, and in 2011, Norway and Iceland joined.

What it specifically allows:

• Any EU airline from any EU location to the USA: Lufthansa may therefore also fly to the USA from Paris, Air France from Frankfurt.
• Beyond flights: Airlines of both sides may continue flying beyond the partner territory to third countries.
• Cargo especially free: US airlines may operate pure cargo flights between the EU and third countries without touching the USA, and EU airlines conversely pure cargo flights between the USA and third countries.
• Heathrow open: With the end of Bermuda II for EU traffic, the privilege of the four Heathrow airlines fell. Delta started flights to Heathrow in 2008, for example from Atlanta and New York JFK. Where to best photograph the long-haul traffic there is shown in the Heathrow spotting guide.

What it doesn’t allow: European airlines still may not offer domestic flights in the USA or take a majority stake in a US airline. In Europe, the agreement is therefore often criticized as unbalanced. Because slots at Heathrow remained scarce despite open traffic rights, access there became above all a question of takeoff and landing rights. Why these are so valuable is covered in the article Airport slots.

Brexit: a country leaves the single market

With the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU, British airlines lost their status as EU air carriers. Since then, they may fly between Great Britain and the EU but no longer freely between two EU states or within a member state. Conversely, the same applies to EU airlines in Great Britain. For traffic with the USA, the United Kingdom concluded its own open skies agreement at the end of 2018, which took the place of the EU agreement after the withdrawal.

The airline groups have aligned their structures accordingly. The three best-known examples:

Group	Solution	How you recognize it
easyJet	easyJet Europe based in Vienna with Austrian certification	OE registrations, ICAO code EJU
Ryanair Group	Ryanair UK for the British market, alongside Ryanair DAC (Ireland), Malta Air, Lauda Europe and Buzz in the EU	G registrations at Ryanair UK, EI-, 9H- and SP- at the EU subsidiaries
IAG	British Airways remains British, Iberia, Vueling and Aer Lingus are EU airlines in the same group	G-, EC- and EI- registrations under one roof

You will find more about the individual companies in the profiles of easyJet Switzerland, Malta Air, Lauda Europe and Buzz.

What you see of it at the fence

The single market is not an abstract topic. It explains some of the typical spotter questions.

Why Malta, Ireland or Bermuda in particular show up so often in registers has to do with leasing and taxes as well as the single market – that is explained in the article Why so many aircraft are registered in Ireland, Bermuda or Malta. How to read a prefix is covered in the guide Understanding aircraft registrations, and the system of the Austrian register is explained in the article OE registrations.

A well-known fifth-freedom classic is the connection of Emirates via Milan Malpensa to New York. Such routes are only possible if the agreements involved expressly provide the right to continue flying. Check the current schedule before you travel for it – such connections change with schedule periods.

Pros and cons of liberalization

Whether open skies and the single market are a success is judged differently depending on perspective.

The uniform rules also include, incidentally, the compensation for delays and cancellations that applies to EU airlines and to departures from the EU. Details are in the article Passenger rights under EU Regulation 261/2004.

What to watch out for

• Brand is not the same as operator. A livery says little about the operating license. Registration and ICAO code show which company is flying.
• Open skies is not a single market. Between the EU and the USA, far-reaching freedoms apply but no cabotage. Only within the EU are airlines treated completely equally.
• Traffic right is not a slot. An agreement allows the flight; at full airports, the airline still needs free takeoff and landing times.
• Codeshare changes nothing about the right. Who sells doesn’t matter – what matters is who flies. Background in the article Codeshare flights explained.
• Check the status. Agreements are supplemented, companies are founded or dissolved. The information here reflects the situation as of October 2026 in broad strokes.

Conclusion

Since Chicago in 1944, every international scheduled flight has depended on traffic rights that states agree among themselves. Open skies agreements have largely replaced the old, narrowly worded treaties since 1992. Europe went even further: with three packages and full cabotage from 1997, a single market emerged in which every EU airline may fly anywhere. Externally, the EU has negotiated jointly since the 2002 rulings, most visibly with the USA since 2008. At the fence, you recognize this by registrations from Malta, Austria or Ireland at bases across Europe and by US jets at Heathrow.