Aviation Intelligence Reporter September 2025
- The (Not So) New Distribution Capability – Update, or Metaphor? ATC in the USA
- Unleashing the Aspiration for American Drone Equivalence
- J-P Sartre Investigates: The Existential Mystery of the Missing SAF AI in Yield Management:
- Artificial Intelligence or Artificial Insanity?
- Aviation Advocacy Cryptic Crossword 17 – Solution
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The (Not So) New Distribution Capability – Update, or Metaphor?
It is a lesson for us all. Do not call something ‘new’ if it then takes more than a decade to bring it to fruition. Do not keep changing what that end goal is, too, if you want to retain any sort of credibility. Or, perhaps to put it another way, particularly if you are looking at bringing in any sort of new technology, do not let the marketeers and communications people run the show, whilst sidelining the technology experts that will have to deliver it. For sure, do not let the boffins run the show either – that way madness lies – but do find a balance. Do not big up things in advance, for example. Do not try to address every change in technology before finalising the stage you are currently working on. And, a final warning, do not then try to bring about change to your larger organisation that leaves observers reaching into the metaphor cupboard.
The problems for IATA started when, in 1999 or so, it decided, on behalf of its members – driven by its members’ then immediate cashflow crisis – to eliminate travel agent commissions. Remember, the Internet was in its infancy then. Airlines did not sell via their on-line presence. A lot of travellers paid in cash. Agency bookings accounted for almost all ticket sales. No-one rocked up to an airline’s swanky downtown head office to buy a ticket. Yes, a few bought last-minute tickets at the airport. Agents, which got a base commission on international tickets of 9%, used what where then called computer reservation systems, or CRS, to issue the tickets. The airlines owned the CRSs. In addition to the base commission, airlines incentivised agents by paying ‘overrides’ for targeted volumes of sales. By the end of last century, the cost of distribution of tickets – commissions – approached 20% of an airline’s costs. After commissions were discontinued, agents had to charge their passengers a fee for their services. But, passengers (and their data) now belong to the agents, not the airlines. The move broke the master/agent relationship. But bizarrely, the airlines retained override incentives.
ATC in the USA
It sounds like it should be a Springsteen song – one about a hard scrabble life and working-class angst, but finally, it seems that after years of telling the world how marvellous the US ATC system is, Something Is To Be Done to make that true. Cue portentous music. Cue also a press conference from the new(ish) Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy in May where he took the plaudits for doing what no administration before the current one had done and proposed an entirely new ATC system. Tens of billions of dollars will be spent. It will all be done by the end of 2028. As befits this administration, that was somewhat economical with the truth, in that much has been done and much has been spent, but the results are very underwhelming. The NexGen project was hardly a stellar success. But, given the then very recent mid-air collision over Washington National airport there was a hunger for change. As ground-breaking and ambitious as this announcement was, it was put into the shade by the next Big Announcement, that the US was going to put a nuclear reactor on the moon. What could possibly go wrong? How intense is this administration’s hatred of renewable energy that it shuns easy to install photovoltaic panels on the bright side of the moon?
Unleashing the Aspiration for American Drone Equivalence
By Philip Butterworth-Hayes, Editor, Unmanned Airspace
At the start of August, US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced a new rule to normalise, sorry, unleash, commercial beyond visual line of sight drone operations, eliminating the process for individual waivers. The aim, finally, is to allow drone operators in the business of package delivery, agriculture, aerial surveying and public safety to fly their drones autonomously over long distances with one flight operator managing twenty drones or more at the same time. The proposals are a follow-up to President Trump’s June 6 “Unleashing American Drone Dominance” executive order. That also opens up the airspace to passenger carrying electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft and offers some US competition to the Chinese who are currently, by some degree, the dominant force in the global low-altitude airspace market. China accounts for between 80-90% of the global commercial drone market while in Guangzhou, tourists are already flying around the city in eVTOLs without pilots on board.
J-P Sartre Investigates: The Existential Mystery of the Missing SAF
Chapter 6
The case was getting curiouser and curiouser. Existentialism-Centrale, Brussels, did not know where the SAF was. But, to be fair to Commission, when in doubt, positively manifest. They do not know where it is, but if their approach was to wish SAF into existence. That will nearly be same, surely? In a rare fit of research, I looked into the reams and reams of writing and rules about SAF. Well, I started to do so. Then I had a coffee. A double. Is there a rule of life that says the more unlikely something is, the more we legislate for it? If that is the case, what do we conclude in the case of the Existential Mystery of the Missing SAF?
AI in Yield Management: Artificial Intelligence or Artificial Insanity?
As mentioned above, Delta has admitted openly that it is using AI to do a part of its yield management. Is this the start of the end for the way we used to do things? The NDC initiative more than likely enabled this move. That is not without irony, because the IATA proposal was made to keep the airlines together, rather than allow them to plough their own furrows. How does one compare and contrast? Who better to ask than an AI programme? In this case, Gemini, Google’s system. Here is what it said.
