Aviation Intelligence Reporter December 2024 – January 2025
A Crying Wolf Tax
Interlining on the InterRailwayLines?
Passenger Rights? Everybody is in Listening Mode
Pilots Redo Asymmetric Survey About Asymmetric Employment
Supply and Demand in Demand Management
Putting the AI into Travel and Tourism
Party Like It’s 1944
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A Crying Wolf Tax
If governments around the world want to find new revenue streams to pay for the things they are expected to do, such as finding ways to make SAF a reality, the Aviation Intelligence Reporter has a suggestion. Tax crying wolf. Nobody wants to pay more tax than necessary; but, as Oliver Wendell Holmes noted, ‘taxation is the price we pay for civilisation’. You would think that the world is about to end every time someone suggests a tax anywhere, any time, on aviation. Using the word ‘tax’ brings out the hyperbole. Not the logic, not the sense, but double servings all round of the hyperbole.
Interlining on the InterRailwayLines?
Once every five years the people that will make up the new Commission are, first, designated by the member states (assiduously ignoring requests for things like gender balance); secondly, allocated roles by the President of the Commission (assiduously trying to honour, as far as possible, gender and political balance); then, thirdly, interrogated by the parliamentary committees with oversight of the work their allocated Directorate is responsible for; and, assuming that the Commissioner-designate survives the grilling from the MEPs and the politics involved in approving them, they can, finally, swing their feet under their desk, roll up their sleeves and get to work. The hearings are highly choreographed, like the ritual mating dance of cranes. The MEPs know what they want/need to hear. So do the Commissioners-designate, who have been briefed to the gills to say what needs to be said. In short, each Commissioner-designate comes along, delivers an undergraduate essay on the topic of utopia as it relates to [insert DG competence here] and all going well, a new generation of cranes ensue.
Passenger Rights? Everybody is in Listening Mode
When politicians need to be seen to be taking an issue seriously, whilst, frankly, having no idea what do to next, they go into ‘listening mode’. The Democratic Party in the US is currently in listening mode, having not heard what the electorate was screaming during the election. Listening mode can cover a multitude of sins: it can take as long as you want it to take; you can carefully hand choose, sorry, curate, the voices to which one listens; or it can be cover for finally making preferred, but postponed, policy announcements, only now with the apparent support of ‘the people’. Plus, no-one can criticise you for seemingly doing nothing. Listening is either a very active way of being passive or a very passive way of being active.
Pilots Redo Asymmetric Survey About Asymmetric Employment
Long time readers of the Aviation Intelligence Reporter will recall that in 2015, our friends at the eponymous European Cockpit Association organised a survey of its members to plumb the issues around what they refer to as asymmetric employment contracts. That is, contracts that are not completely symmetrical with, and foursquare identical to, the traditional version of what the ECA believes a pilot’s contract should look like – directly employed by the airline on a clear roster of hours per month, with agreed benefits and so on. A classic contract, in other words, a cut and paste from about 1970, or ‘the good old days’ as no doubt the ECA thinks of it. A contract identical to those the members of the board of the ECA were first employed under. But, much has happened since then, and little of it has been ‘symmetric’, but bless them, the ECA wants these to be preserved for ever, perfectly symmetrically.
Supply and Demand in Demand Management
Even more scary than the nasty Supply Chain Monster, Demand Management is what keeps airline executives awake at night. The industry has evolved to be like a shark – it cannot be still, or it will die. Since liberalisation, it has been built on the assumption of perpetual growth. Any move to limit that growth is an existential threat. But there are others with their own version of what is an existential threat circling the industry as well. The environmental lobby most of all. In its eyes, if we cannot abate aircraft emissions, we will have to limit the amount of flying that is done. To be fair to IATA’s Willie Walsh, he gets this and has pushed hard to both try to encourage a responsible response – which for better or worse, at least for the short to medium term, revolves around SAF – and to point out to policy makers the economic risks of curbing aviation’s growth.
Putting the AI into Travel and Tourism
Artificial Intelligence is a pervasive presence in our life; every operating system and search engine proffering its own ‘helpful’ AI chatbot or model to ease the difficulties of modern life. No industry is untouched by it, not even the most human of all industries: travel and tourism. From crafting users’ bespoke travel experiences to optimising operational efficiency, AI has gone beyond novelty status. It is with us, like it or not, and now is the time to address how it is developed and incorporated into our field.
Party Like It’s 1944
With apologies to the artist formerly known as Prince
What are the implications for aviation of the recent election in the US? Time will tell, of course, but it does look like we have gone past peak liberalisation. If the world’s largest aviation market and market-maker is going back to America First, any hope for further reform seems, at best, optimistic. The fall-back position is thus to focus again on the tried and tested ways of the Chicago Convention.
Given that the next president of the United States seems intent on establishing a monarchy, complete with dynastic ambitions, it seems appropriate that we ask a real prince, in this case Prince, or at least the former artist known as the artist formerly known as Prince, to tell us what to do. So, with apologies to him, and thanking him for the music, it is time to party, to go completely mad, like it is 1944.
