Aviation Intelligence Reporter August 2026
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Aviation Intelligence Reporter August 2026
The Bumper Summer Reading Edition
Treading That Fine Line Between an ETS and a Trade War Your Cut-out and Keep Haversine Calculator
How Single will the Single European Sky Ever Be? Nationalism Comes to Haunt Shipping Lanes – Don’t
Look Up The Odyssey
Sovereignty, or Doing Business – Pick a Lane
Aviation Intelligence Reporter Annual Crossword Number 018
Treading A Fine Line Between an ETS and a Trade War
When it comes to summer, Europeans are of one mind. They vote for it. They would vote for their summer holidays twice, if they could. There is real pressure on everyone in any organisation to get what they have been diligently working on in the first half of the year finished and out the door before the summer. So, spare a thought for the Commission staff, summer beaches and languorous days beckoning, a siren song to their very Europeanness, as they laboured mightily to get proposed revisions to the Emission Trading Scheme published.
Your Cut-out and Keep Haversine Calculator
As you luxuriate on the beach/shelter in front of the air conditioner/flee encroaching flames, your mind is likely to drift to better understanding haversine distances. Of course it is. To help, here is a link to a map that shows the world from the absolute centre of Europe – Frankfurt Airport. Do not laugh, this is not a joke. This is a serious attempt by the European Commission to ‘level the playing field’. It works. We concede. The playing field for satire is now entirely the Commission’s. We have been levelled. Not in a million years could the Aviation Intelligence Reporter come up with something so funny. Is there a person alive who does not think that Frankfurt Airport is not the centre of Europe? Of course not! Europe, c’est FRA. That others argue that it is somewhere in Lithuania, or Slovakia, or a point in Ukraine, or Hungary, or Czechia, is on them.
How Single will the Single European Sky Ever Be?
The Aviation Intelligence Reporter has, on numerous occasions, written about the Single European Sky and bemoaned the lack of progress towards anything looking remotely like a single sky (European or otherwise). Will it ever come? As a reminder, the idea of creating legislation for a Single European Sky – and who could be against such a logical and sensible idea? – emerged from the high number, and cost, of operational delays of the late ’90s. It was based on the reasonable hypothesis that the fragmentation of European airspace was creating significant inefficiencies in this airspace and that it should be managed according to operational efficiency rather than national borders.
Nationalism Comes to Haunt Shipping Lanes – Don’t Look Up
We are watching a reverse Suez crisis unfold in the Straits of Hormuz. Revenge for Britian at last, served very cold indeed. In 1956 there was a secret carve-up: Israel invades first, Britain gallops in as noble peacekeeper to seize the canal, everyone acts amazed. Instead, Egypt scuttled ships across the canal, oil supply collapsed, petrol rationing came in, the pound tanked. Washington declined the chance to save the currency. Ten weeks after the paratroopers landed, it was game set and match for Britain as a global power.
The Odyssey
With apologies to Homer
Unless you have been living under a rock, you will have noticed that there is a new version of The Odyssey in cinemas. But, as a reader of the Aviation Intelligence Reporter, you already know aviation is ahead of mainstream popular culture, no matter how unpopular certain casting decisions might be. Indeed, you might have wondered why it has taken the film world so long to catch up with our unique and special story. The Odyssey is one of, if not the greatest, epic poems of all times. A story of one of the bravest, intelligent, yet complex, sons of aviation. It tells of his journey back from a bitter war to his true home – an airline CEO role.
Farnborough 2026: The Strange Shape and Sound of Things to Come
By Philip Butterworth-Hayes: Editor, Urban Air Mobility News
Major airshows like Paris and Farnborough are the modern aviation equivalent of the Oracle of Delphi – they give you a glimpse into the future but the answers to the questions you need to know are nuanced and coded. To really understand what will be happening to technology and business in five, ten years, normally you have to employ expensive consultants to transform the Delphic messages into actionable intelligence. But at this year’s Farnborough International at least some of the messages were so clear they did not need interpretation.
Sovereignty, or Doing Business – Pick a Lane
Romania appears to be engulfing itself in what can only be described as an omni-shambles. The ANSP is being starved of funds, and its owner, the state of Romania, is up to its eyeballs in debt. But no, not sovereign debt: real, commercial debt. The Romanian government owes the drug company Pfizer a considerable amount of money arising from the need Romania had to purchase Covid vaccines, as a matter of some urgency, in the height of the pandemic. That debt has not been cleared to the satisfaction of Pfizer, which, like any other commercial entity, decided to start legal proceedings to recover the money. Poland, incidentally, has a similar issue on the horizon. As does Albania. And India, albeit each for different causes of action.
