Aviation Intelligence Reporter – May 2008

Written by Admin-AIR-NEw on . Posted in 2008, AIR


Slots: take a number
Hailing SESAR
The Environment: Déjà vu – again
Regulation – time to leap forward to 1980?

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Slots: take a number

There was a time when slots was an arcane branch of airline management. Slot management people knew what their life held in store: regular slot coordination meetings all over the world; huge sheets of paper with aircraft utilisation patterns on them; that far away look that experts get when asked to summarise their speciality into 30 words for a management briefing; the literature like prose of the slot coordination guidelines. The good old days. Tell that to young people today and they would not believe you. Suddenly, slots are at the front. The slot coordination process has been dragged into the spotlight, blinking and looking shy, like a small furry nocturnal mammal that scientists have discovered has an enzyme in its liver that cures cancer. Or lays golden eggs.
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Hailing SESAR

The ability of the airline industry to find irony and comedy never ceases to amaze. If satirists were writing this it would be dismissed as being too far fetched. This month, the great and the good gathered in Rome to watch the hand over from the planning phase of SESAR (the new integrated technology platform underpinning the Single European Sky) to the implementation phase. Rome, that by-word in world aviation for implementation. Maybe they did it for the obvious pun.
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The Environment: Déjà vu – again

The proposal to include aviation in the European Emission Trading Scheme went a further round this month, with the reconsideration by the Parliamentary Environment Committee of the current draft of the proposal, handed down by the European Council. One needs a degree in European procedure to be able to follow the processes that this proposal has gone through (or perhaps be able to sit for a degree at the end of this process), and this was another stop to add to the scrapbook.
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Regulation – time to leap forward to 1980?

One of the most amazing things about life is the way that things seem to happen in clusters. Somebody talks about something, suddenly, everybody talks about it. References to black swans (a concept so outlandish that no-one was prepared for it, as the very popular book has it) are now everywhere. Following on from the success of the ‘Black Swan’ theory, and accepting the logic that using Australian animals sells books, it is tempting to call this the Kangaroo theory. One bounds across your lawn, suddenly every kangaroo in the district seems to be bounding over your lawn. Except, of course, in Australia, that would be ‘every bloody kangaroo in the district…’
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