Aviation Intelligence Reporter – April 2012


ATM Reform – Stuck on the Great Roundabout of Life
How Green is My Fig Leaf
What to Say about the Industry’s Messaging?
That’s not an airport – it’s a secret garden next to a teleport
How would Amazon sell a commodity like an airline ticket?
Unleveraged technology at the heart of Biz-Av’s inefficiency


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ATM Reform – Stuck on the Great Roundabout of Life

True to form, delegates to this year’s ATC Global, the ATM industry’s biggest annual exhibition, held each March in Amsterdam, were told that the industry was ‘at the crossroads’. Every year they are told so. One speaker dared to try to change the analogy. The industry is not at a crossroad, it is on a roundabout, and it has been for several years, going around and around. By the end of the week delegates were entitled to feel very dizzy indeed.

How Green is My Fig Leaf

Once a year, like a Masonic clan, the great and the good of the air transport industry gather for a weird ritual. It is convocation of the Other World, a topsy-turvy world, a world where black means white, good means evil and up is down. Fair is foul and foul is fair.

What to Say about the Industry’s Messaging?

IATA’s Board of Governors, or BoG, has given DG Tony Tyler the task to focus on the positive role that air transport plays. This is a welcome relief from the negativity and ‘polite shouting’ of the Bisignani years. So now Tyler is on a mission from BoG to tell the world about just how very spiffing airlines are and how very stupid the ETS is. Whoops. How is that going for him then?

That’s not an airport – it’s a secret garden next to a teleport

Airports are a black hole for airlines. As airlines have commoditised their product and indeed the entire travel experience, they have been reducing their presence at most airports to dysfunctional machines, disinterested agents and mutinous baggage handlers. In a desperate bid to show just how little money they are spending, the airport experience gets increasingly disheartening. But, somehow, except in the most remarkable cases, that rubs off on the airline, not the airport. It is the airline’s fault that the security queue is too long, the check-in process awful, and your bag is lost.

How would Amazon sell a commodity like an airline ticket?

The industry association formerly known as the Air Transport Association, the recently renamed Airlines for America (A4A), is suing the US Federal Government, in the form of the Export-Import Bank. Its complaint is that by offering credit to exporters, such as engine and airframe manufacturers, it is discriminating against US-based airlines that are not able to get such cheap financing.

Unleveraged technology at the heart of Biz-Av’s inefficiency

German start up Mytaxi raised $10M to accelerate the growth of its online distribution platform in late January. It is using the growing ubiquity of smart phones to disrupt the traditional sale of taxi inventory through fragmented dispatch offices. Compared to hoping to hail a cab on the street corner, or suffering interminable phone calls with a local cab station, Mytaxi’s technology provides users with a far easier way to search online for their closest available cabbie.