Aviation Intelligence Reporter February 2021
The Roaring Twenties, or Never Again? Please Pick your Cliché
TInfrastructure, Infrastructure Everywhere, And Not a Price to Charge
TWe’re Forever Blowing (Up) Bubbles
TSingle European Sky Re-Re-Re-Dux
TWeaponising Slots
TOnly Sustainable Tourism Will Be Sustainable
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The Roaring Twenties, or Never Again? Pick your Cliché
Welcome to 2021, the start of the Twenties, at least for pedants. After our once-in-a-century pandemic, the optimists say, we are now due our once-in-a-century Roaring Twenties, as economies bounce back, pent-up demand is unleased and the globe starts to catch up on a year of lockdown. Somehow, it does not feel all that roaring at the moment, as we turn the calendar over and welcome in second and third waves. The vaccination programs may
be rolling out but the roar is still clearing its throat, backstage. Ah, the optimists say, digging into their bag of clichés, it is always darkest before the dawn. And then there are those that say ‘Never Again!’ as forcefully as possible.
Infrastructure, Infrastructure Everywhere, And Not a Price to Charge
Remember the good old days of 2019? Remember when we were screaming that we needed more infrastructure? More runways, more ATM capacity, new terminals and more access roads were the very minimum the industry demanded. The future, IATA’s DG Alexandre de Juniac told us, depended on us addressing the ‘infrastructure challenge’. We needed more, more, more. That was then; this is now. The infrastructure challenge now is to work out how to maintain what we have, and more importantly, how to pay for it. For the foreseeable future, we will have too much, although it will continue to be out-dated and often in the wrong places. The crisis has not solved those problems, it has made it worse.
We’re Forever Blowing (Up) Bubbles
Humans like certainty. We like to understand what is happening, and to forecast what might happen. Viruses, on the other hand, are not big fans of statistics, or certainty, or forecasts. That should not be news, but given how frequently we seem to have thought that the virus would, for example, like a break at Christmas – we climbed out of our trenches, football in hand, ready to play, only to be rushed to ICU – or that the virus does not work nights, perhaps we need to remind ourselves again. We can forecast whatever we like, but that way madness lies. What we do not know exceeds by many multitudes what we do know, and simply to try to get back to the old normal is not going to work.
Single European Sky Re-Re-Re-Dux
Once, maybe a decade or so ago, we might have called the constant interplay between the European Commission and the various European member states over the Single European Sky a ‘cat and mouse game’, but that implies speed and agility, on both sides. Cats and mice have shorter attention spans that governments and the Commission, so it is hard to
believe that it would still be going on, all these years later.
Weaponising Slots
If you do not think that the entire slot system is broken you are a lobbyist for a legacy airline. Why were slots invented: to bring order to busy airports before new capacity came on line. That was a fool’s errand. They morphed into bringing order to the investments airlines made at crowded airports. Then they started to store the value of that investment. At this point, regulators intervened; hoping to stop, in some minor way, the abuse of market power incumbent airlines had built up by asking – no more than that – that new entrant airlines be thrown the occasional crumb. Preferably of Marie-Antoinette-ian cake.
Only Sustainable Tourism Will Be Sustainable
The UNWTO calculates that in 2020 the tourism sector lost $1.13 trillion, 11 times the loss recorded during the 2009 global economic crisis. Pubs, restaurants, and cafes are shut-in 18 of the EU’s 27 member states. The hospitality sector is requesting the EU to develop a sustainable reopening scheme, rather than the binary ‘open-close’ approach in use today.