Aviation Intelligence Reporter – June 2017
The Big Picture
The Risk to Globalisation in a Sea of Nationalism
Deplaning Airlines’ Reputations
Low Cost Interlining: All Out, All Change
Appy-Go-Lucky: Business Aviation Greets the Digital World
The Laptop Ban: Hold the Hold Luggage
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The Big Picture
Politics is show business for ugly people. Like all good board-treaders, politicians love an audience and crave the limelight. That is one of the two reasons there is such big trade in retired politicians on the speaker circuit. The second reason is that it is easy to write one 25 minute stump speech for all occasions, gleaned from the first draft of the inevitable book, and then get out there and burnish, burnish, burnish that reputation, putting to right all the things you did but about which you feel you were misunderstood when in office. The appearance fees are not too shabby either.
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The Risk to Globalisation in a Sea of Nationalism
The election of new French President Macron aside, the trend toward nationalism among most of the world’s most influential countries continues unabated. President Trump’s inability to play nice with his fellow G7 leaders in Sicily is but the most recent example. Anyone who believes we live in a borderless world is advised not to look at the newspapers. Politicians everywhere trumpet patriotism and security over globalism.
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Deplaning Airlines’ Reputations
We have all seen the footage of Dr David Dao, bloodied by United’s out-sourced thugs, forcibly removed from a flight. In one of their many attempts to divert blame, United made clear that the thugs were not their thugs they were airport security thugs, so that is OK. Think about that. United Airlines did not vet the men it let on-board to forcibly remove a passenger. United’s CEO Oscar Munoz made his apologies – four of them, over 48 hours – until he eventually got it right. Practice makes perfect, which is just as well, as United seems to be a customer-service-apology-generating machine. Off-loaded children; dead rabbits: the hits keep coming.
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Low Cost Interlining: All Out, All Change
No airline flies to every airport on earth, but there are passengers that want to go to every airport on earth. Add to that the nationality-based regulatory framework of aviation and it is clear that some means to facilitate the process of getting passengers to every airport on earth is necessary. Step forward interlining. IATA is the forum that makes it possible, and it remains the keeper of the holy flame of interlining.
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Appy-Go-Lucky: Business Aviation Greets the Digital World
The business aviation industry limped to the starting line for EBACE 2017, the annual gathering of the great and the good of European biz-av. The first quarter’s new aircraft deliveries of 2017 confirmed that the industry is heading for its poorest sales for a decade. For almost a decade now, as new jet deliveries atrophy and flight activity flatlines, the industry has seemed short of ideas. Surveys suggest it has failed to get the luxury monkey off its back, with much of its target audience either ignorant of the product or unwilling to be associated with its often-toxic image.
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The Laptop Ban: Hold the Hold Luggage
In early March, the US banned large electronic laptops carried-on flights to the US from eight Middle East and North African countries. As with the failed travel ban, speculation swirled that the real motivation was President Trump’s ‘economic nationalism’ (or protectionism, as it is known to the rest of the world). Just one month prior to the initiation of the laptop ban, US air carriers urged Trump to take on the Middle East carriers. The affair smacked of economic nationalism, that is, until the UK followed suit and upped the ante by adding Tunisia and Lebanon to the list.
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