Aviation Intelligence Reporter – The Bumper Summer Reading Edition August 2020
The New Normal: The Aviation Summit Does Eurovision: Come in Berlin
The New Normal: Creeping Bermudaism
Back to the Future: Interlining as the New Normal
Slots: Losing it Over Not Losing it
A Politician’s Guide to Green Skies in a Time of Coronavirus
The New Normal for Tourism: A Safari to Find Sensible Solutions
Coronailanus – A Shakespearian Tragedy
Asia’s New Normal: Sacred Cows Run Amok
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The New Normal:
The Aviation Summit Does Eurovision: Come in Berlin
The Croatian Presidency tried to hold an Aviation Summit in its half-year presidency in mid-March, just as the lockdowns started. Dubrovnik was spared still more tourists and many putative attendees had their first experience of the vouchers-vs-refunds debate as plans were hastily reorganised. We have all learnt a lot since then about how to work
around the pandemic, but nonetheless, there is no shortage of pathos when the aviation industry organises an on-line Summit. Adding bathos to the pathos was the decision of the German Presidency to hold it in the style of Eurovision, with speakers being beamed in from their national capitals. All that was missing was the leader board, but in the spirit of the great unspoken message of Eurovision, the real winner was Europe itself.
The New Normal: Creeping Bermudaism
The New Normal: Creeping Bermudaism
It looks increasingly like we are reverting to 1946. What a golden year that was for aviation. The Bermuda Agreement was signed, IATA was formed and ICAO got down to business. Fortunately, in the last few decades we have been able to cast off much of this excess baggage. But now, in one pandemic, we might end up straight back where we came from. We will not have passed Go, but some airlines have collected more than $200 in Monopoly money. But not all of them. That depended on each government and airline business model. To describe it as asymmetric is to insult asymmetry.
Back to the Future: Interlining as the New Normal
Back to the Future: Interlining as the New Normal Riding on the wave of nationalism and national interest – purely based on health concerns you understand – states are looking again at taking control of the capacity
coming into and out of their countries. Legacy national carriers are no doubt licking their chops at the prospect. All over the world, airline planners will be dusting off their copy of IATA’s Multilateral Interline Traffic Agreement, or the MITA. It is the foundation document for interlining.
Slots: Losing it Over Not Losing it
In the good old days, the really good, really long-ago old days, not just before Covid, but before deregulation, the aviation industry was very different. It was profitable for a start. It was an arm of government. The airlines wrote the rules, which were waived through by regulators. There was none of this pesky competition malarkey and there was a very
real collegiate sense of community and cooperation amongst airlines. Nowhere was that more visible than at airports, where all the airlines meet and need to get along, if only procedurally. The thinking was that whatever competition there might be between airlines was a commercial matter; airports were exempt. Airports were about operations, not commerce. Even as deregulation took hold elsewhere, at the airport the all-in-this together bonhomie never stopped. That is why, to this day, some of the least efficient,
most antediluvian, mediocre procedures in aviation happen at the airport.
A Politician’s Guide to Green Skies in a Time of Coronavirus
By Jacques Mason – Independent Aviation Consultant
Dear Minister,
A full year has gone by since I wrote to you about Green Skies. Incidentally, I noticed the letter was leaked to the Aviation Intelligence Reporter. I hope you subscribe.
The New Normal for Tourism: A Safari to Find Sensible Solutions
Thomas Wolfe knew that we cannot go ‘back home to the old forms and systems of things one remembers as static and permanent.’ Nor will we be able to go and visit the old forms and systems as tourists, as much as might want to do so. When the world is stocked with vaccines, going back to the way we were will no longer be political ideology, but our natural desire. But when those days finally arrive, we will discover the wisdom of
Wolfe. We will not be able to go back home again. Nor, we will learn, can we holiday the same way. Prolonged isolation has uncovered, or at the very least acknowledged, truths that many have known for years.
Coronailanus – A Shakespearian Tragedy
Yet again, we confront an on-going tragedy, positively Shakespearian in scope. We fight the virus; we fight the effects of the virus. The republic of aviation is under attack. It is unfolding in a way the bard would have recognised. How might he have handled it?
Act 1
The aviation industry, having thrown off the scourge of unprofitability, was enjoying seven years of plenty and pax aviania in their imperial city Aeropolis. But there was a problem, a problem that the tribune, Menenius Iata Agrippa, had withheld from the plebs. The wealth was not shared equally. Only thirty Patrician families had grain to spare, but not to share. ‘The industry had never had it so good’ thundered his co-tribune Caius
Covid Marcius.
Asia’s New Normal: Sacred Cows Run Amok
Scott Kirby, United’s CEO, recently said ‘there are no sacred cows’. His omnivorous diet is winning accolades for how to establish a new normal. But not in Asia. In India, cows are sacred. The region may be reluctant to follow “no sacred cows” dogma. But it offers ideas to other regions about going about establishing their new normal.
The Aviation Advocacy Annual Crossword 012
