Aviation Intelligence Reporter – May 2008
Slots: take a number
Hailing SESAR
The Environment: Déjà vu – again
Regulation – time to leap forward to 1980?
To read the full report please login first. login here
Do you want to become a member?
click hereSlots: take a number
There was a time when slots was an arcane branch of airline management. Slot
management people knew what their life held in store: regular slot coordination meetings
all over the world; huge sheets of paper with aircraft utilisation patterns on them; that far
away look that experts get when asked to summarise their speciality into 30 words for a
management briefing; the literature like prose of the slot coordination guidelines. The
good old days. Tell that to young people today and they would not believe you.
Suddenly, slots are at the front. The slot coordination process has been dragged into
the spotlight, blinking and looking shy, like a small furry nocturnal mammal that scientists
have discovered has an enzyme in its liver that cures cancer. Or lays golden eggs.
…
Hailing SESAR
The ability of the airline industry to find irony and comedy never ceases to amaze. If
satirists were writing this it would be dismissed as being too far fetched. This month, the
great and the good gathered in Rome to watch the hand over from the planning phase of
SESAR (the new integrated technology platform underpinning the Single European Sky)
to the implementation phase. Rome, that by-word in world aviation for implementation.
Maybe they did it for the obvious pun.
…
The Environment: Déjà vu – again
The proposal to include aviation in the European Emission Trading Scheme went a
further round this month, with the reconsideration by the Parliamentary Environment
Committee of the current draft of the proposal, handed down by the European Council.
One needs a degree in European procedure to be able to follow the processes that this
proposal has gone through (or perhaps be able to sit for a degree at the end of this
process), and this was another stop to add to the scrapbook.
…
Regulation – time to leap forward to 1980?
One of the most amazing things about life is the way that things seem to happen in
clusters. Somebody talks about something, suddenly, everybody talks about it.
References to black swans (a concept so outlandish that no-one was prepared for it, as
the very popular book has it) are now everywhere. Following on from the success of the
‘Black Swan’ theory, and accepting the logic that using Australian animals sells books, it
is tempting to call this the Kangaroo theory. One bounds across your lawn, suddenly
every kangaroo in the district seems to be bounding over your lawn. Except, of course,
in Australia, that would be ‘every bloody kangaroo in the district…’
…