Tit for MRO Tat

It's begun. The reaction was slow, perhaps, but inevitable, and as the Democratic Congress under a Democratic administration moved to enact its pro-American, pro-labor, protectionist agenda, a reaction was inevitable. Now it has come from the other side of the Atlantic. John Bruton, the European Union's ambassador to the US, said in Brussels that the FAA bill passed last week by the House has "language which would negate the Open Skies agreement," the landmark pact meant to open transatlantic skies (eventually).
The measure orders FAA inspectors to do a check of any non-US maintenance and repair shop that handles US-based and US-flagged airliners. The FAA would have to perform inspections twice a year, and some 400 MRO shops in Europe would be targeted, along with the measure's real target, shops in Central and Latin America.
Bruton said that if Europe made a strict retaliatory move, some 1,200 maintenance shops in the US would be targeted for inspection by European safety authorities. That, said Bruton, a former Irish prime minister, could cost both sides millions. Bruton said that he would work to persuade the Senate to remove this foreign inspection-station measure, but that "the protectionist platforms" on which many elections to Congress were based made this a challenging task.