Aviation Intelligence Reporter – June 2018
The US-Gulf Carrier Tiff Ends Not With a Bang but a Whimper
Slotting the Elephant in the Room into the Airport Charges Debate
Australasia’s Airlines Want Heavier-Handed Regulation
Sustaining the Fallacy of Sustainable Tourism
The Central Error in Decentralised UTM
Air France: Truth is Below Par Against Gulf Carriers
Have the Adults in the Room Stopped Aviation’s Brexit Train Wreck?
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The US-Gulf Carrier Tiff Ends Not With a Bang but a Whimper
‘Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act,’ wrote TS Eliot in The Hollow Men, ‘Between the conception and the creation, falls the Shadow… For this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.’ After another round of discussions, this time with the UAE, the US carriers must know how he felt. All that idealism; all that motion and conceptualising. This is how the complaints against the Gulf carriers end: not with a bang, but a whimper. Even by the standards of a decent whimper, it was wimpish.
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Slotting the Elephant in the Room into the Airport Charges Debate
The dialogue of the deaf that is the debate about airport charges in Europe continued at full volume in May. There can be no doubt about the intensity and the passion of both sides as they try to convince the Commission that light-handed/heavy-handed regulation is the only possible option consistent with European policy and sensible rule making/the only thing stopping capricious airport charges. There appears to be no middle ground and no compromise. So bitter is this dispute now that even in areas where one might reasonably assume there was the basis for making common cause, such as pushing back against the airports having to foot the full cost of airport security, there is no room for compromise.
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Australasia’s Airlines Want Heavier-Handed Regulation
It is not just Europe that is discussing airport charges and airport regulation. The poster boys of light-handed airport regulation, Australia and New Zealand, have come in for some very heavy-handed criticism from their airlines. Their regional trade association A4ANZ – no, not a cheer squad for a large antipodean bank, but actually Airlines for Australia and New Zealand – have published their own study how they consider airports are run. It is fair to say that they are not impressed.
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Sustaining the Fallacy of Sustainable Tourism
Tourism is big business. Last month, the European Commission estimated it will spent €11.1 million between 2015 and 2018 developing pilot projects and preparatory actions related to tourism. And the Commission just loves telling us about it. Even in the age of the GDPR, the Commission is a press release generating machine. Like this one: ‘Green juice coloring book heirloom hashtag aesthetic tofu. Biodiesel bitters street art ennui conscious single-origin coffee fingerstache farm-to-table locavore flexitarian’ it said. Oh no, wait, that was written by hipsum, a hipster-biased dummy text generator.
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The Central Error in Decentralised UTM
The Commission is currently attempting to devise regulations for the operation of U-Space – the proposed single European traffic management system for UAVs – a task akin to changing the tyres of a moving car. There are a number of interested parties, including the ANSPs, the attitude of which varies from working to facilitate the introduction of UTM to assuming a total monopoly over its operation in their airspace. There are also UTM providers. Given the attitude of the ANSPs they are now in a desperate race to be the sole provider of UTM technology for each of the ANSPs.
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Air France: Truth is Below Par Against Gulf Carriers
We have previously mentioned that the scourge of Gulf Carriers, indeed the sworn enemy of state-owned airlines everywhere; the defender of free trade at all costs, and of course of liberté, égalité and fraternité, as well as the God-given right to put your hand out to catch any and all public money that might be thrown around, the part State-owned Air France, is once again in the free money queue demanding a hand-out. This time it is to pay for the superannuation of staff to who this bastion of free enterprise had to sadly bid adieu. It was most definitely not au revoir. No, in the face of unrelenting commercial skulduggery Air France had no option but to, once again, turn to the State for aid. This, you will surely appreciate, is not State Aid. No, State Aid is naughty. These are justifiable payments in the face of une crise existentielle.
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Have the Adults in the Room Stopped Aviation’s Brexit Train Wreck?
Autocracy and trade wars walk hand-in-hand. In 1933, historian and then US Ambassador to Germany, Dr William Dodd, gave a speech in Berlin decrying economic nationalism and autocracy. These things are antithetical to the system of trade that was set up at Bretton-Woods, later replaced by the WTO. Indeed, that was the idea: when competition – and cooperation, for that matter – occurs at the level of trade, it diffuses larger competitions, say, at the level of war. Autocrats rely on nationalism – economic, racial, whatever works – in order to stay in the limelight. When imperial designs enter the fray, fair trade goes out the window.
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Tags: Airlines, Airports, Competition, Drones and UAVs, Uncategorised