Aviation Intelligence Reporter-April 2020
We Look Before and After, and Pine for What is Not The Shape of Things to Come?
Chicago II, or Bermuda III?
Take Aways From Asia: Beware the False Recovery
State Aid: State What? All Bets are Off
Love in a Time of Corona(virus)
The Aviation Intelligence Reporter Maverick Maverick Award Winner
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We Look Before and After, and Pine for What is Not.
The past is a foreign country’, LP Hartley noted in The Go-Between, ‘they do things differently there.’ They most certainly did. And they had different concerns, different worries. Even, it seems, a different language. They talked of different things, and had different shareholders. But that was then, and this is… well, it is not now, no, not yet. This is somewhere else instead, a lacuna, a blank onto which we can project our hopes,
or more likely at the moment, our fears. We are now all in the role of go-between, as we try to understand what is going on in both the past and the future.
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The Shape of Things to Come?
What will the new world look like? It is, of course, much too early to tell, but perhaps we can start to make out four possible scenarios through the haze. The first, of course, utopian as such thinking is, would be to take a blank sheet of paper and redesign everything. Imagine that for just a moment: a modern, efficient, competitive aviation industry. An industry that is normal, governed not by special rules, by exception, but by normal laws, commercially. In this world we can have global airlines subject to
competition laws, focusing their network on how they think they can attract and retain passengers, in whatever innovative way works. Oh, it is sweet to dream.
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Chicago II, or Bermuda III?
Modern aviation came into existence in late 1944 with the signing of the Chicago Convention. Incredibly, it still regulates air transport. But it is increasingly showing its age. That was true before the coronavirus first mutated. But now, as governments around the world throw money at aviation, it is imperative that we look at it again.
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Take-Aways From Asia: Beware the False Recovery
A good night out in Hong Kong’s Lan Kwai Fong nightlife district traditionally ends with a kebab from Ebeneezer’s. Faithful to ritual, even if the actual houses of worship are closed in this crisis, Ebeneezer’s was the final stop for a woman who was concluding three consecutive nights of partying in mid-March. She would become known as Case 217, one of at least 16 positive coronavirus diagnoses linked to the nightlife area.
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State Aid: State What? All Bets are Off
In those long ago, long lost days of yore, those BCE days, when people met together and conducted trade in agora, under the arches of the various institutions built and then named after long-forgotten leaders and regulators, Pericles, Augustus, Trajan, Schuman, Berlaymont and European Parliament – that last one may be a work of fiction – you could always draw a crowd by going out into the busy and bustling forum and yelling
‘State Aid’. How the crowds would flock to you. Here was a chance to bash foreigners without looking Hungarian. Here was a chance to show your fundamental Europeanness by demanding that most European of concepts, the level playing field.
Love in a Time of Corona(virus)
Whatever you knew about tourism a month ago is now otiose. Even if a month ago you were spending all your time looking at the impact of COVID-19 on tourism that has littleto-no-bearing on what is happening today. Italy has overtaken China in the most deaths in one day stakes. The United States has taken over globally as the country with the most cases. USA, USA etc. It took the US one month to pass the 1,000 death mark. The 2,000 death mark took an additional 48 hours.
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The Aviation Intelligence Reporter Maverick Maverick Award Winner
Regular readers of the Aviation Intelligence Reporter will know that the ANSP trade association, CANSO, and its very own Sancho Panza, ATCA, wanted to spice up the World ATM Congress this year that was to be held, BCE, in Madrid in early March. They landed on what they elected to call the ‘Maverick Awards’. This was announced with great pomp. You might think that the Maverick Award would recognise those that did the most maverick things. If you did think that, you were clearly using a non-CANSO approved use of the word ‘maverick’. Your use would be non-Maverick.