Aviation Intelligence Reporter September 2022
- The Worst Silly Season on Record
- Legacies’ Autumn of Discontent made Full Bummer by this Son of Cork
- Private Aviation, Public Entertainment
- The Long and Winding Contrail (Saga)
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- Travel Wars: The Revenge of the Tourist
- Aviation Advocacy Crossword 013 – Solution
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The Worst Silly Season on Record
All around the world, we are breaking records. The hottest summer on record, the worst bushfires on record, the wettest winter on record, the worst floods, the record for breaking the most records on record. Sadly, aviation is not immune from this record-breaking frenzy. There can be no doubt that this is the least silly Silly Season on record. That is not something to be proud of.
Legacies’ Autumn of Discontent made Full Bummer by this Son of Cork
As Tolstoy once noted, all happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. He could have been talking about aviation. Not only are we still at twenty paces over the issue of airport handling, and baggage handling in particular, but the ways airlines are each trying to handle the sudden surge in traffic are also unhappy in their own ways. The Qantas approach was first to blame the passengers for not being ‘match fit’ – never underestimate the importance of sport in Australia – but that has now evolved to attempting to bribe frequent flyers with an AUD50 voucher. Think of that as a winners’ bonus. Staff are being bribed with a small pay rise and a larger one-off cheque. Qantas seems to have moved on from insulting the passengers to insulting the staff.
Private Aviation, Public Entertainment
One of the great entertainments this summer was tracking the flights, and thus the emissions, of the rich and famous, as they jetted across the globe, or frequently, across the suburb. Truly we are moving from an era of surveillance to one of sous-veillance. Everyone carries a camera and satellites track our every move. Attacking the very rich for their emissions is the sort of flygskam we can all get behind. The French could have fun with I Fly Bernard, which started by tracking the movements of the CEO of luxury brand LVMH, Bernard Arnault. Over time, that expanded to track other members of the haute classe. In the anglosphere, there was the grandfather of these sites, @ElonJet. Elon Musk, affronted that his privacy was being infringed so blatantly, tried to buy the site, to shut it down, for $5,000. Funnily enough, he was knocked back. It could have been his for $50,000 but that was beyond the price Musk was prepared to pay. He chose to try to buy Twitter instead, and thus cut if off at source.
The Long and Winding Contrail (Saga)
There is more to sustainable aviation than merely greenhouse gases. Long before we worried about greenhouse gases, we were trying to address NOx gases. Early ICAO CAEP meetings focused on NOx and their interplay with noise. Even in 2008 the impact of NOx and contrails was known to be damaging. In fact, the non-CO2 elements contribute more to climate change than carbon emissions; fixing them is hard. At the time, suggestions included a multiplier on fuel uplift as part of the ETS’ MRV process. Instead, in 2017, when the aviation ETS was amended the first time, EASA was charged with looking at the issues. DG MOVE was required to report back in 2020, which it did, bringing a very detailed study down to less than four pages. But, those four pages packed a punch, suggesting six changes that, whilst taking five to eight years to fully verify and implement, would make a real difference.
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Just in case you think that aviation is not made of politics, that every decision taken does not have a political dimension, that we may never get out of the mire of being the opposite of commercial, consider the war in Ukraine. No, not the flight diversions, not the aid that is being sent, the impact on fuel prices and so on. Think of the slots. Does anyone ever think of the slots? Does anybody really care?
Travel Wars: The Revenge of the Tourist
Who better to turn to, when considering the complex emotions of travel, than Thomas Wolfe? A man who in his 38 years wrote about travel and longing, with books like Look Homeward, Angel and You Can’t Go Home Again. His work gives us the chance to delve into that most complex of current travel concepts, that of ‘Revenge Travel’.
‘The human mind is a fearful instrument of adaptation, and in nothing is this more clearly shown than in its mysterious powers of resilience, self-protection, and self-healing…Unless an event completely shatters the order of one’s life, the mind, if it has youth and health and time enough accepts the inevitable and gets itself ready for the next happening like a grimly dutiful American tourist who on arriving at a new town, looks around him, takes his bearings, and says, ‘Well, where do I go from here?’’.
Thomas Wolfe
