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Each Member State of the European Economic Area (EEA) has appointed a competent authority which manages the inclusion of aviation in the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS). The EEA comprises the EU Member States plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway.
Administering Member State
To reduce administrative costs, each operator is administered by a single Member State.
Aircraft operators based in the EEA are administered by the Member State that issued their operating licence. In all other cases, the operator is administered by the state with the greatest estimated attributed aviation emissions from that operator in the base year.
Operators and their administering Member States are listed on two different lists:
- List of aircraft operators – published every year in February
- Prior compliance lists – published every year in May and in October
EEA-wide list of aircraft operators
The list of aircraft operators can be found under the Documentation tab at the top of this page.
The most recent list was adopted on 29 January 2013. It contains 29 EEA countries since there is currently no aircraft operator allocated to Liechtenstein. Only fleet lists submitted by 10 December 2012 have been considered in this list.
ll operators performing an activity listed in Annex I to Directive 2003/87/EC are included in the EU ETS whether or not they appear in the list of aircraft operators. Likewise operators which stop operating flights are excluded from the scheme once they cease to perform an aviation activity listed in Annex I and have surrendered the relevant allowances, rather than at the point when they are removed from the list.
The list of aircraft operators is based on information provided by operators through fleet lists.
Fleet lists and update of the Prior Compliance List
The following aircraft operators should submit their fleet lists to the Commission:
- Operators which have performed flights since 2010 but have neither been included in the list of aircraft operators adopted on 3 February 2012 nor in the prior compliance list published in May 2012.
- Operators which started flights to the EU and EEA in 2012, but used service companies to file their flight plans and to pay route charges, and do not have a CRCO account.
- Operators which have already submitted an ETS Fleet List but have subsequently made changes to their fleet are kindly requested not to submit a new Fleet List at this stage. A new process for updating existing Fleet Lists will be made available later in the year.
The fleet list form 
[145 KB] was last updated on 2 December 2011.
To facilitate the process, aircraft operators may pre-submit their fleet list to Eurocontrol (ets.info@eurocontrol.int) for initial verification prior to submitting it to the European Commission. Eurocontrol will then check that all information required for processing has been provided. The completed form is to be submitted to the European Commission at ENV-EU-ETS-AIRCRAFT-OPERATOR-LIST@ec.europa.eu.
Prior Compliance List
The prior compliance list contains aircraft operators which are not included in the list of operators yet, and the Member States which will most likely administer them in the near future.
The latest version of the prior compliance list [49 KB] was published in May 2012. It includes the operators which submitted their fleet lists between 15 December 2011 and end of March 2012. It also includes Eurocontrol's December 2011 traffic data (which were not included in the February 2012 list of operators).
Operators included in the prior compliance list are included in the list of operators when it is next updated.
Most documents can be found under the Documentation tab at the top of this page.