Aviation Intelligence Reporter – November 2019
ICAO and CORSIA: Nothing to See-ia
ATM Reform: How Green is My Silver Bullet?
Tourists: Over Paying; Over Here; Overtourism
Competition in UTM and ANSPs: How Much is Too Much, or Too Little?
Building Airport Connectivity? As Easy as Inserting Airline A into Slot B
Abuse of a Dominant Position? Not at the Australian Airports
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ICAO and CORSIA: Nothing to See-ia
It sounds like it should be a limerick, or at least some sort of ragged doggerel, but sadly, nothing to see, no change, no hope, no cheerfulness or healthy ease was the outcome from the ICAO General Assembly that concluded in early October in Montreal. If only the Assembly had been held in November, we would have barely needed to update Thomas Hood’s poem No! at all:
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ATM Reform: How Green is My Silver Bullet?
Florian Guillermet, the Executive Director of the SESAR Joint Undertaking, told the A4E meeting of its members’ COOs of a recent experience he had had, outside the industry aviation bubble. He was telling a group of school children about SESAR JU and what opportunities there were for meaningful jobs in the aviation industry. To illustrate the importance of getting things right and eliminating unnecessary flying, he told them of a flight that he, the Commissioner for Transport, the DG of DG MOVE, and a number of other senior executives of various parts of the air transport industry had taken to return to Brussels from the World ATM Congress in Madrid. Due to strike action in France, the aircraft had taken an extremely long and winding route across much of Europe. ‘Who allowed that flight to proceed?’ he was asked. ‘Why was it not stopped?’
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Tourists: Over Paying; Over Here; Overtourism
We are all Venetians now; and we are all tourists to Venice as well. The two are contradictory, and we all live that contradiction. We enjoy expanding our cultural database, relaxing and exploring. We hate crowds getting in the way. The Louvre serves as a seminal repository for some of the world’s great art, but the already-busy halls of the Dutch Masters, the glories of classical Greece and Renoirs, pale into nothing when considering the mountains of madness in front of the Mona Lisa. It is so chaotic that the significance of the art itself is lost, leaving no time to appreciate it amongst the packed, thronging tourists. Tourists also clog up the public transport system, the roads and our favourite restaurant. But we all love finding a charming little trattoria that only the locals know about. So it is with the macro effects of overtourism.
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Competition in UTM and ANSPs: How Much is Too Much, or Too Little?
It is a truth universally acknowledged that drones are different. Unless you universally believe that they are just a continuation of the development of aviation and should be treated accordingly. However, if you universally acknowledge that they are different, you open your mind to at least the possibility that there are ways other than the current air traffic control model to manage their passage through the airspace. That is dangerous thinking because it opens up the possibility that such ways to manage flying drones might also then apply to manned aviation. At that point, your thinking and that of the drones-are-different crowd meet up. Unmanned traffic will need special treatment in the airspace, but over time, that will colonise how manned aviation is treated.
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Building Airport Connectivity? As Easy as Inserting Airline A into Slot B
The Aviation Intelligence Reporter’s belief that change to the current slot regime is long overdue is well known. But it is good to know that we are not alone. No, the Florence School of Regulation too thinks that slots need serious reform. It held a workshop recently, and has now published its report of that meeting (known as an Observer). The entire Observer is worth reading, but in a comment included in it, Professors Matthias Finger and Juan Montero noted that revisions ‘might be in order’.
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Abuse of a Dominant Position? Not at the Australian Airports
We have mentioned before that after lengthy and strident complaining from the Australian airlines, the Productivity Commission (a highly-regarded arm of the Australian civil service) was enlisted to review the relationship between the airlines and the airports. It is a review with direct relevance to the situation in Europe, where for some time now the Commission has been considering the Airport Charges Directive. As in Australia, the airlines are convinced that the airports are abusing a monopoly position.
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