Originally Posted by
David-A
You are drawing a flawed conclusion from that paragraph.
What it says is that Gibraltar airport is out of scope. It does not say that all flights which come into contact with it are not covered.
Ok, the back story is that Madrid wanted to use the previous 1991 Regulation to resolve a series of longstanding issues with the United Kingdom, relating to both overflight and the use of the airport by their own airlines. As you will know better than me, the Gibraltar government also has their own views about this. In 1987 a heads of agreement was reached which was intended to resolve this and other aviation related matters to the Rock, but to the best of my knowledge this was not resolved and remains unfinished business. In order to prevent this unresolved matter from blocking the entire revised Regulation in 2002-2003, the Commission Directorate put that clause in to take Gibraltar out of scope, see also preamble 24. I did check with the CAA on this point back in 2015 and this wording emerged from those discussions.
The sensible thing to do is for me to link that section down to your comments and then people can see the different perspectives here.