EBAA CEO Fabio Gamba and NBAA president and CEO Ed Bolen gave a panel of European regulators an earful about the EU Emissions Trading Scheme this morning at the EBACE 2012 opening general session. The EU officials included Matthew Baldwin, the European Commission’s director for aviation and transport policy; Marian Jean Marinescu, a member of the European Parliament; and Salvatore Sciacchitano, executive secretary of the European Civil Aviation Conference.

“We tried to find ways to create a more flexible simplified procedure whereby small emitters are not required to monitor emissions on a flight by flight basis,” Baldwin said at the session. However, he said all operators can do now is to “turn to Eurocontrol,” adding that political support for EU-ETS remains strong.

Gamba noted that business aviation in Europe is a $25.8 billion sector that provides more than 164,000 jobs. As such, he said, “We expect compassion from legislators. ETS is the fault of national aviation authorities who have failed in our interests.”

NBAA president Ed Bolen was also critical of the scheme. “Our treatment is not equitable–a commercial operator can make two flights a day every day before it finds itself in the ETS scheme. Non-commercial operators making one single flight have to go through a huge administration burden. Registration costs thousands of dollars. This doesn’t make sense.”