Aviation Intelligence Reporter – May 2025
A Tariff on Both Your Houses!
Shipping Versus Aviation on Climate
IATA’s Error Message on Its Type B Standard
Airline Wi-Fi Wars: Jeff’s Amazing Future or Elon’s Known Universe JP Sartre Investigates: The Existential Mystery of the Missing SAF
Holidaying Closer to Home This Year
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A Tariff on Both Your Houses!
As a thought experiment, ask what might have happened if President Trump, not President Biden, had won the 2020 American election. Trump would have been responsible for the post-Covid recovery; would not have been able to campaign against the status quo; and have no time to stew on revenge. Instead, we are where we are…
Shipping Versus Aviation on Climate
By Bill Hemmings, Brussels. Former civil society ICAO/IMO/EU representative
Last month, the International Maritime Organization’s environment committee, MEPC, agreed, by contested vote, to impose complicated carbon pricing measures on ships involved in international trade, together with a GHG fuel standard. If ratified as an amendment to MARPOL, shipping’s 1973 Treaty on ship pollution, it will apply to all ships involved in international trade. Enforcement and non-compliance penalties are to be imposed by flag and port states. Yes, arrival states as well as flag states. IMO work on ships’ growing GHG began in 2003 but languished – the IMO, is after all, ICAO for ships, so easy to envisage. The South Pacific’s Small Island Developing states rescued things a decade ago, pushing for a global fuel levy to both cut emissions and provide mitigation finance, especially for low lying islands and vulnerable communities. Ships can tanker fuel for months without refuelling, so this seemed the best practical option. The EU and over 30 African, Caribbean, Pacific and central American states came onboard. Success seemed imminent. Until with just a month to go, Singapore, nominally a SID, and Norway’s chairperson, together with an apparent quiet EU nod, suddenly watered the levy proposal down to an ETS-type trading of permits. Forced to a vote by an opposing Saudi led group, but with the EU, China and Brazil now backing the change, the result came as a bitter blow to the small island and climate vulnerable states. The Pacific SIDS abstained rather than align with the ‘no’s’ or the US, whose delegation had already withdrawn, threatening consequences.
IATA’s Error Message on Its Type B Standard
The single most ubiquitous, yet invisible, thing in aviation is the messaging protocol Type B. You might think of it as telex, but the days of machines rattling away in every office and workspace, using a unique, agreed, carrier/function/location addressing format and those language short cuts – years before the world said ASAP, we said SASPO – are certainly gone. Still, modern systems rely on Type B when we make bookings, file flight plans, exchange ATC data, track lost luggage or to order catering, engineering spares and a million other things. Billions of Type B messages are exchanged by and between airlines, by ANSPs, by airports.
Airline Wi-Fi Wars: Jeff’s Amazing Future or Elon’s Known Universe
Philip Butterworth-Hayes
Interesting things happened in the global airline wi-fi war in April. A mega/MAGA battle of disruptors is taking place; an Elon Musk v Jeff Bezos slugfest, opening up new possibilities for market distinction among the world’s carriers. On 8 April, at the Aircraft Interiors event in Hamburg, Airbus announced it was working with Amazon on Airbus’ High Bandwidth Connectivity Plus (HBCplus) programme, ‘with high speed, low-latency Low Earth Orbit satellite inflight connectivity service from Project Kuiper, Amazon’s satellite internet network… Airbus and Amazon plan to integrate Project Kuiper’s connectivity solution into the Airbus line-fit and retrofit aircraft catalogue.’ Airbus’ HBCplus programme is a cool piece of kit – by uncoupling the inflight connectivity hardware from the service supplier module, Airbus’ customer airlines can switch bandwidth suppliers without changing hardware. Airlines can choose suppliers based on cost, global connectivity, robustness of service, megabit-per-second upload/download speeds and latency. To be truly macho about it, it’s the mbps number which is the standout metric for marketeers – but note, the mbps figures quoted here are not definitive, merely indications of what can be achieved in ideal operating environments.
JP Sartre Investigates: The Existential Mystery of the Missing SAF (Part 2)
It never ceases to amaze me that even in cases of fascinating existential complexity, everything always comes down to paperwork. The retainer I asked the Commission to sign was the start of an avalanche. Forms after disclaimers after statements denying liability after conflict-of-interest declarations come towards me like an on-coming train. It could drive an existentialist insane. All that paperwork; all those forms. My head was spinning. It was time for some fresh air. Until the Commission paid its retainer, which meant until I had signed all the forms, that was about all I could afford.
Holidaying Closer to Home This Year
Tourism in the European Union is back, with a post-pandemic revivalist period of optimism, overcrowding, consumer fatigue, and legislative catch-up. It’s a cocktail familiar to anyone who’s ever flown: exciting, chaotic, undercooked, overpriced, periods of interminable boredom. Nonetheless, reports from the US suggest that an American transcontinental road trip, the taking in of Broadway, a summer school at an Ivy League university or even transiting en-route to somewhere else is not a great option. Frequent flyer schemes are offering flights to New York for the same number of points as flights within Europe. If ever the focus should be on Europe’s tourism, it is now.