Aviation Intelligence Reporter June 2026
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The Age of Entitlement
Is the world imitating aviation, or is aviation imitating the world? We, the aviation industry, struggle to understand that question – the world follows us! Mostly out of envy. Or out of that love of big things that make a lot of noise and go fast. What is that called? Oh yes: futurism. That was the future once, at least in the last mid-century Europe.
If aviation leads the world, it is responsible for the end of the post war peace settlement, the defenestration of the UN, the end of NATO. We have let the bureaucrats decide what should happen to innovation. How innovation is to be marshalled and controlled. The invasion of Ukraine, the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, is on us. Is Star foretelling the fate of NATO? Is OneWorld? Is the other one, the one centring on Air France? Even more distressingly, IATA no longer has an interest in working on behalf of the industry at large. Cyber attacks on airports? Not IATA’s concern. Totally invisible. Not a word from IATA. The alliances may have been NATO, but IATA is the UN. An industry that once worked as one is Balkanising.
The New Aviation Strategy: Same Old Airline Demands
The policeman’s lot, Gilbert and Sullivan tell us, is not a happy one. But at least they are in the fresh air, resolving issues as they arise. It is much harder for the regulators. Trapped in an office, working at the theoretical level, trying to please, or at least appease, as many as possible. All they can produce is a strategy, one with as much buy-in as possible. Spare a thought for the good folk at DG MOVE, currently updating Europe’s aviation strategy. Their unhappy lot is to try to find a way to balance the demands of the entire spectrum of stakeholders, all of whom assume that their particular concerns are a priority. The task is to balance the competing interests of the various stakeholders. We wish them well.
How Advanced Can AAM Be if ICAO Wants In?
Bad news for the AAM industry. ICAO is on your case. To be fair, ICAO has been marking out a role in the drone, AAM, eVTOL, or RPAS industry for a long time. ICAO would argue they have been on the case since 1944 – and indeed before that, because Article 8, which talks about cross border flights by remotely piloted air systems, is a carry over from the 1928 protocol to the 1919 Paris Convention. See how forward looking the Chicago Convention is, Team ICAO proudly purr. Talk about fit for purpose… Someone should tell them that the reference is to ‘flying torpedos’. Unmanned propeller aircraft fired from a launcher. There were drones in use in WWII. They were used to provide target practice for aspiring gunners. Fun fact, the first professional photo of Marilyn Monroe was taken when she worked in a factory making them as part of the war effort.
Pigs in Space: What Is Going On Around the Moon?
Were you one of the millions of people fascinated by NASA’s recent jaunt to the dark side of the moon? It glued attention to a live broadcast in ways we thought lost forever. What was achieved? The new frontier was to go behind the Moon, a place we cannot look at even when there. On the military side, which is nothing to do with NASA, there is a lot going on. For NASA, Artemis is a reminder to those keen to colonise space that it still exists. NASA has never been afraid of the private sector. JFK’s Moonshot gave huge amounts of money to various American companies with clear boundaries but no specifications. One company was to get the entire thing airborne, one was to control its flight, another to get the men back to earth. The Eagle landing module in the Smithsonian in Washington DC, proudly bears the word ‘Grumman’ for all visitors to see. That showed Russia.
John-Paul Sartre and the Case of the Missing Word – Chapter 3
My marching orders were as clear as they were going to be. My job was to find out why, and how, a word that meant one thing for a very long time, was suddenly hijacked and made to mean something else. Wait, ‘hijacked’. I realised that this talking aviation game was a lot of fun. My new client had suggested I start with the A4E. No, I could not work out what the number was for, either. They have more than four members. And airlines for Europe? I thought they were the airlines of Europe. Are they the only airlines for Europe? Is that Europe’s lot? Don’t most of them fly into Europe too? What about Airlines from Europe? Words, eh? And, in this case, numbers…
Tracing the End of Baggage Tracking
Until the invention of smart tags, the airlines had a world-beating ability to track your baggage. To know where it was when in those five in 1,000 moments when the interline (or indeed the on-line) system failed. Like smart tags, it could locate your lost bag and, generally, unlike a smart tag, so what had to be done to get it back to you without too much fuss. They were the good old days. The industry pulled together using standards, lots of standards, to make the system work. Comms standards, standards for the baggage tagging, standards for the exchanges between the various airlines and various airline stations involved. It worked on telex, but the fact is, it worked. IATA managed those standards, using expertise the industry depended on.
The La Marseillaise for Today’s French Travellers
As mentioned above, Ben Smith, CEO of Air France, is clear how he sees the world’s aviation system. States negotiate rights to operate, for their citizens. To be fair to Ben, that is pretty much correct, or at least, it was thought to be correct until about 1995 and the advent of liberalisation and such flash-in-the-pan concepts like open skies and liberalisation. Those are not French concepts, as a general comment. No, for Smith, the only loyal French person is an Air France passenger.