Aviation Intelligence Reporter September 2021
Covid’s Metamorphosis
ANSP Charges: Irresistible Force Meets Immovable Regulation
ICAO’s New Secretary General Gets Rapid Political Welcome
Space Tourism: To Limited Liability, And Beyond
The Unbearable Lightness of Being IATA
esting the Limits of UTM technology: Both Luck and Science Needed
The Aviation Advocacy Annual Crossword 013 Solution
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Covid’s Metamorphosis
These are the best of times for legacy airlines. They will tell you it is the worst of times, but it is just one piece of good news after another at the moment and, best of all, none of it takes any work on the part of the airlines. The good news just rains down on them. Like generations of legatees before them, the legacy carriers merely sit back and wait for their legacy to arrive. But, you say; Covid variants are lurking out there, just waiting to mutate. Governments, too afraid to maintain lockdowns, give the variants a better than fighting chance to do their thing and crash wave after wave on our shores. How can that be good?
ANSP Charges: Irresistible Force Meets Immovable Regulation
One may campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose. That is equally true for ATM regulation. At the highfalutin poetic end of the ATM regulation pool, runners and riders are warming up for a series of what promises to be a bruising series of Trialogues as the present iteration of the Single European Sky regulation, proposed by the European Commission and backed by the European Parliament, meets Europe’s transport ministers. At the much more prosaic end of the pool, there will be much prose exerted trying to untangle the current ANSP charging regulation.
ICAO’s New Secretary General Gets Rapid Political Welcome
It goes without saying that the role of a Secretary General at an international organisation is a political one. Nationalities and roles are finely balanced and deals done to ensure voting support. But recently, any pretence that states were working as one internally, even if they were playing the Great Game externally, has been shattered. That is going to make it harder still for the new Secretary General of ICAO as he gets his feet behind the desk in Montreal. Juan Carlos Salazar from Colombia replaced China’s Fang Lui at the start of August. At around the same time, Captain Sully ‘Miracle on the Hudson’ Sullenburger was selected as the US’ new ambassador, returning the role to one of a full ambassador. President Trump had downgraded the role, and had not paid the US’ fees. It is possible to see this in terms of turning a corner.
Space Tourism: To Limited Liability, And Beyond
Fee paying passengers first went to the International Space Station in the early 2000’s, but Space Tourism officially began somewhere between 11 July and 20 July 2021, the dates when Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin launches took place. It is interesting to compare this with the 1920s, when a similar set of technology-minded posh boys starting tinkering with aircraft. Like Branson and Bezos, they began by barnstorming. The first commercial service was in 1914, offering a single seat across a bay in Florida and by 1928 there was a nascent global commercial airline industry. And, because this is aviation, once there is a commercial service, or the hint of one, there was a demand for regulation. In this case, protection from the families of passengers injured or killed in what were still risky flights, using developing technology. Enter the Warsaw Convention of 1929, the world’s first private international law treaty. Its newest iteration (there have been a few) is the Montreal Convention 1999
The Unbearable Lightness of Being IATA
Chapter Three, in which I get a hint to look at cargo, and ask myself why it needs to be so existential
I went back to the office. This was starting to look more complex than I had hoped it would be. IATA wanted everything, including all the things that it could not have. It wanted everyone on earth to use its products so that no-one on earth would need to use their products, whilst having a department devoted to building capability for competitors to its products. That was somewhat existential, I concluded.
Testing the Limits of UTM technology: Both Luck and Science Needed
The race between a terrible accident delaying the global implementation of beyond-visual-line-of-sight commercial drone services and the availability of new technologies and procedures to stop such an event happening is hotting up. On August 18, Switzerland became the first country in the world to introduce a nationwide voluntary Network Remote Identification service. The best skyguide’s acronym department could come up for this was NET-RID, which seems somewhat counter-intuitive.
Aviation Advocacy Crossword 013 – Solution
