Aviation Intelligence Reporter October 2025
The ICAO General Assembly: All the Fun of the Fair
IATA: Is it Jumping, or is it Being Pushed?
The Thing about Competition is, it is Competitive
Still Further Asymmetric Thinking About Asymmetric Employment
Apparently, ATM is Class Based
Washington DC, Where you Cannot Trust the Anti-Trust Decisions
ICAO: Leading the Way in International Law
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The ICAO General Assembly: All the Fun of the Fair
At the risk of being oxymoronic, the ICAO General Assembly is interesting this year. It has been underway for more than a week. By the time you weed out the welcoming speeches and the diplomatic niceties – including every speaker feeling the overwhelming need to congratulate all and sundry and to welcome all and sundry – the Assembly has done about three hours of actual work in week one. It hits its stride in week two, once the diplomatic mumbo jumbo is finished. Only then is the hurly burly to be done. And there are some significant battles to be lost and won.
IATA: Is it Jumping, or is it Being Pushed?
As we discussed last month, these are not salad days at IATA. The backbone of the industry – and thus IATA – the Conferences (tariffs, services and agency) have effectively been dismantled. The conferences were built on the assumption of an industry that worked together, that cooperated at all costs. As competition became a religion – in 1980 there were about five anti-trust agencies in the world; every country has one now – the working assumption is that to talk with competitors about prices is unforgivable. The Tariff Conferences (both passenger and cargo) died early this century, unable to convince regulators that aviation was special, and that the benefit of agreed wholesale pricing for complex itineraries outweighed the competitive harm of agreeing them when airlines are both wholesalers and retail competitors in the weird, 1940s imposed, reality of aviation. That the base assumption in the Chicago Convention itself is the development of aviation in an ‘orderly manner’ stopped cutting ice.
The Thing about Competition is, it is Competitive
Last month, the Bundesverband der Deutschen Luftverkehrswirtschaft, (the Federal Association of the German Aviation Industry), and the French fédération de l’aviation et ses métiers, (the French Aviation Federation and its associated professional groups and trades) brought their show to town. The one person missing from this mouthwatering array of nouns was Mario Draghi, but rest assured, he was there in spirit. You cannot turn around in Brussels without saying ‘competitiveness’. We have Draghi to blame for this, but one assumes he hoped his report would spur action, not constant repetition.
Still Further Asymmetric Thinking About Asymmetric Employment
Say what you like about pilots, they know how to do go arounds. But when you need to do two go arounds, maybe you need to look at the procedures being used. The eponymous European Cockpit Association is once again taking a run at what they now call atypical employment, or the contracts of pilots that are not like their own employment contracts. They are called bogus contracts, too. This is its third attempt to stick this landing. This time around, the ECA is trying to position its distaste for asymmetric contracts within the Commission’s DG Employment’s consultation on ‘Quality Jobs’. We are at the start of a two-year process. Yet another study was launched in Gent at the end of last month. The Commission was there, mob handed, DGs Employment, Justice and MOVE. Mario Draghi was there too, in spirit. Good jobs are a competitive point. International competitiveness, maybe less so. How one reconciles the shortage of pilots, the right to free movement and ‘quality jobs’ was less obviously clear.
Apparently, ATM is Class Based
Few things define quotidian as succinctly as a Regulation 261 claim for compensation in the case of delay. However, we have become aware of one such claim that raises a very interesting point. A passenger, sitting in Economy on a Swiss service, arrived at Zurich airport, after the usual sorts of delays and slowdowns, with an onward connection. Sitting in Economy, in a large aircraft – an A330 – it took some time for the aircraft to be unloaded onto buses and then to be bussed to the terminal. By the time the unloading, the bussing, the disembarking from the bus and the rush across the terminal to the next gate (via passport control) was completed, the connection was lost.
So far, so predictable. However, that was not the end of the story. At the gate, after being told, in no uncertain terms, that the passenger was too slow, our correspondent had the presence of mind to ask if any other passengers had made the connection. Yes, some had made the connection, was the reply. What class where they travelling in? Why, in Business Class.
Washington DC, Where you Cannot Trust the Anti-Trust Decisions
What is going on in DC at the moment? How does one make sense of the recent decision of the US DOT to revoke the antitrust immunity granted to Delta and Aeroméxico to engage in a price and capacity setting JV. This is bound to cause a major disruption in Delta’s business, but hitherto President Trump has been rather pro-airlines. Or at least that was the assumption.
The airport in Mexico City has no room to grow, so inevitably, there is bound to be some concentration there – some winners and losers – based on legacy slot holdings. Slots are even mentioned in the DOT decision. Revoking the immunity puts Delta in a precarious position, as restoring its previous slot position will not be easy. It had relied on AeroMéxico for its access. What is the sudden desire on the part of the Trump administration to enforce antitrust laws? That seems incongruous, given its approach to the Federal Trade Commission more generally. The FTC has been hollowed out of the Lina Khan acolytes that under the Biden administration had restored a more detailed analysis of dominance and market concentration (and market power).
ICAO: Leading the Way in International Law
International law has faced existential crises over the past decade or so. Since 2013, China has expanded its territory by building artificial islands in the South China Sea. Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, shot down a commercial airline in the same year, then conducted a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. More recently, the WTO has been killed by tariffs; the UN is being systematically defunded by the US; Israel all but ignores international humanitarian law; and Iran was bombed without regard to legal justification.
Much of this comes as the US pivots away from a rules-based international order. The Financial Times reported that the US State Department has been invaded by young diplomats from the Ben Franklin Fellowship, led by retired diplomats preaching ‘scepticism about multilateralism’. Franklin famously wrote that Emer de Vattel’s Law of Nations, ‘came to us in good season, when the circumstances of a rising state make it necessary frequently to consult the law of nations’. Even humour struggles to address the snark involved in naming a cabal of nationalists after Benjamin Franklin.