Aviation Intelligence Reporter – April 2019
The A4E Summit: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Mr Hololei Goes to Madrid
Failure of Performance Management, or Failure to Perform?
Airport Charges: What is an ‘Own Goal’ in Australian Football?
You Brexit It You Pay For It: Update 3
Alitalia’s Never-Ending Story of ‘One Time, Last Time’ State Aid, Again
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The A4E Summit: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Cue the Ennio Morriconne theme music. chri-ci-ki-cra wah wah waaah… Willie, Carsten and Michael, the meanest, nastiest gunslingers in all the land are coming to town. Gimlet eyes focused only on the buried gold. So what that there is chaos and war all around them? There are fights to fight, bandits to put asunder, elaborate games of disguise to play. There are graves to dig, crosses to plant, to cross and to double cross. The Airlines for Europe summit: it can be good; it can be bad; it will get ugly.
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Mr Hololei Goes to Madrid
The ATM world confers annually at the annual World ATM conference in Madrid. There might be symbolism in meeting at the former centre of an empire, now surpassed, built on other people’s gold, but it is highly unlikely semiotics were front of mind when the venue was selected. So the irony is accidental. Nevertheless, surrounded by reminders of the glories of empire, ANSPs from around the world come together and look to the future. Then, doubling down in the semiotics stakes, have a gala dinner at the Casino de Madrid. As Iago notes, good wine is a good familiar creature, if well used.
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Failure of Performance Management, or Failure to Perform?
Whenever things go wrong in ATM you can be sure that we will get the benefit of the opinion of any number of self-appointed worthies. They must be stacked up in a holding pattern somewhere, waiting for a chance to share their wisdom. The star turn of this luminosity of knowledge will be the Wise Persons Group report, due shortly, but somehow continuing to be delayed, as the wise persons labour towards reaching their collective wise view. Behind them is a plethora of other groups, of varying wise-ness, but self-assessed brilliance. None are more self-assessedly worthy than the controllers, and they have decided to get their retaliation in first, ahead of the WPG Report. You will be shocked to learn that they are not the problem, they are the victims; and oh, by the way, we need to spend more, with fewer constraints.
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Airport Charges: What is an ‘Own Goal’ in Australian Football?
When it comes to a discussion about airport charges, there is no shortage of rhetoric on offer. In Australia, famous for its robust and colourful use of language, that rhetoric has from time to time been turned up to 11. The CEO of Qantas, Alan Joyce, has described Canberra Airport, for example, as ‘Somalia pirates’. Indeed the airlines of Australia and New Zealand recently got on the A4[region] bandwagon and created an A4ANZ specifically to lobby on the issue of airport charges. All possible avenues were explored. The A4ANZ recruited from outside the industry for its CEO to bring a fresh angle to the discussion. Its chairman, on the other hand, was the former head of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. The 2018 IATA AGM, which was held in Sydney, was hijacked to make sure that airport charges and nothing but airport charges were on the agenda.
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You Brexit It You Pay For It: Update 3
Just when you think Brexit has definitively passed the Tom Lehrer memorial moment when real life can no longer be satirised, up pops Marina Hyde, writing in the Guardian. Brexit, she said, was like watching the Cuban missile crisis being re-enacted by the Teletubbies. Perfect. The grim realisation that Murphy’s Law was going through its warm-up exercises on the touch line is starting to bite. Planning for no-deal is now officially On The Agenda on both sides of the channel.
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Alitalia’s Never-Ending Story of ‘One Time, Last Time’ State Aid, Again
Rather portentously, the Commission’s guidelines on restructuring and rescue State Aid made available to failing companies notes that ‘In order to reduce moral hazard, excessive risk-taking incentives and potential competitive distortions, aid should be granted to undertakings in difficulty in respect of only one restructuring operation… Repeated State interventions are likely to lead to problems of moral hazard and distortions of competition that are contrary to the common interest’. Moral hazard, no less. Well, quite rightly, we cannot be exposed to moral hazard. Or distortions of competition, obviously, but frankly, they sound much more run-of-the-mill.