Aviation Intelligence Reporter June 2020
Le Tour de (Air) France
Bluff and Double Bluff on the State Aid Chessboard
International UAM Ping Pong: China Takes an Early Lead Over the USA
Asia Goes into Bat for Bailouts
The EU-UK Aviation Negotiation Tees Off: A Carrot-But-No-Stick Schtick?
Holiday Affairs in the Time of Covid-19
Astroturf Organisation Serves a Double Fault
Use-It-Or-Lose-It: Gaming the Rules, So Where is the Umpire?
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Le Tour de (Air) France
Ah, summer; the smell of cut grass; long languorous evenings; afternoons on a terrace, watching coverage of le Tour de France… no, not this year. Sports fans have been left with little to watch, if you discount Belarusian soccer. So it is with much joy we say a huge thank you to the airline industry for recreating its very own version of le Tour. Remember le Tour? Cyclists and sport scientists working their way over murderous mountain passes and through picturesque French countryside. Aviation has improved it.
Bluff and Double Bluff on the State Aid Chessboard
Remember the good old days, when State aid, and the obtaining thereof, was a game of chess: a cat-and-mouse tussle with the fun factory that is DG COMP; when everyone wanted State aid, but could not make it look like State aid when they got it; or even that they approved of State aid at all? In those good old BCE days, State aid was akin to the elbow to the Victorians. To even think about State aid was to admit to a deviance of some kind, whilst of course, thinking about it all the time. And in that very Victorian way, it is almost always those that rail against such things the most vociferously that are later discovered to have a huge hidden cache of photographs and paraphernalia.
International UAM Ping Pong: China Takes an Early Lead Over the USA
Exciting times also for aficionados of the booming sport of advanced air mobility ping-pong. AAM ping-pong is the recently rebranded sport formerly known as urban air mobility ping-pong – which first came to prominence as flying taxi table tennis. With its new name it is hoped that the international championships will rise to greater notoriety.
Asia Goes into Bat for Bailouts
Three strikes and you are out, the Thai prime minister decreed after proposing to rescue Thai Airways. Strike one: post-2008 financial crisis changes that did not last. Strike two: a 2015 overhaul yet to be implemented. ‘This is an enterprise we have to rehabilitate and this is the last chance we have to manage the issue so it does not get worse,’ PM Prayuth Chan-ocha said of an airline that should be capitalising on serving Asia’s most visited country. The prime minister-turned-umpire is looking at his airline empire. The team roster includes out of shape 747s and some A340s that were benched years ago but still not sold off. Punters cannot come up to bat on Thai’s antiquated website where mere ticket purchases are clunky. Forget ancillary revenue peanuts and crackerjacks.
The EU-UK Aviation Negotiation Tees Off: A Carrot-But-No-Stick Schtick?
It is not just golf that the British invented. They also taught the world the power of leveraging geography to create strong bargaining positions. In Bermuda in 1946, despite its fledgling aviation industry being deep in a bunker, the UK convinced the US to accept air service agreements with draconian route and capacity controls and requirements that airlines be substantially owned and effectively controlled by its nationals. Heathrow was the jewel in the crown that made that possible.
Holiday Affairs in the Time of Covid-19
You do not need us to remind you that COVID-19 represents an existential threat to the entire tourism industry. Staying home, staying away from others, even loved ones, and the quotidian places we used to visit cut tourism to the quick. So, if we are to recover, or find a new baseline, tourism will be a litmus test for the new normal, micro to macro.
Astroturf Organisation Serves a Double Fault
Over now to the tennis, where there has been a controversial double fault. Everybody’s favourite guerrilla group, the Airline Coordination Platform likes to think that it is helpful to pretend there is public support for its campaigns, so it has entered a contestant in the lockdown tennis tournament. Out struts the E4FC, or Europeans 4 Fair Competition. Is it European? Well, frankly, no. It is a restringing of an old racquet, owned by an American, one Lee Moak, who established a similar organisation in the US to support the completely discredited US carrier campaign against the Gulf carriers. It is what is known as an Astroturf organisation – fake grass. It is not a real grassroots organisation.
Use-It-Or-Lose-It: Gaming the Rules, So Where is the Umpire?
The nicest thing you can say about the relationship between airports and airlines is that it is symbiotic. Sometimes, it is poisonously symbiotic. Surely now is not one of those moments. We are all in this pandemic together, right? Well, no, actually. The airlines have secured waivers from airport charges in some countries and have not been paying landing fees and passenger handling fees in almost all the airports that were once on their route maps. The airlines have not wasted any sympathy on the airports about that. Furthermore, very early on in the lockdown the airlines were also able to secure, without any real or widespread consultation with airports, something more arcane than a fee holiday, but no less important.