That Was The Week That Was 06-10 November 2023
We only get deconfliction in the air
The art of being an air traffic controller, apart, obviously, from developing advanced investment and money management skills, is to deconflict pieces of airspace. Or to put that into human-speak, to stop aeroplanes banging into each other. To be fair, this is both in the air, which have almost inevitably terrible results and on the airport, which is normally less horrid, but is still likely to make the news. It is a highly valuable skill. Fair play to them. To some extent, they work with and depend on the pilots – although long-time readers of this blog may remember this remarkable confession from a very senior A380 pilot, when comparing being a pilot to being a bus driver – spoiler alert: being a bus driver is much harder, because you have to pay attention all the time. We shall come to the pilots in a minute.
Nonetheless, this week, the week that was, was riddled with conflict, in dire need of deconfliction, but it was not in the sky, or on an airport ramp, but elsewhere, so the ATCO skillset was not as helpful.
On Monday we work up to the news that JetBlue has got the go-ahead from the US Department of Transportation to lodge a complaint against the European Commission, and the Dutch government, about the decision to reduce the number of available slots at Schiphol airport. JetBlue are particularly angry because the services they operated, at great risk to their commercial success, as the airport re-opened, where not entitled to grandfather rights, so they are lost. Only grandfathers are entitled to grandfather rights. Any, outside the incumbents, or grandfathers, still think that the slot rules are just fine? And, given the inherently reciprocal nature of traditional aviation, the Americans decided to threaten retaliation against Dutch carriers. Nothing has changed since 1944. It will be a lawyers’ picnic.
If that conflict is destined to the higher courts of various lands, Tuesday’s most wonderous spectacle of pomp and irrelevance, the UK government’s King’s Speech – irrelevant, but hey! what is not to like? You have horses, you have a gold carriage and a separate carriage for the crown, you have the Yeomen of the Guard searching parliament for Guy Faulkes, you have doors slammed in officials’ faces, you have, in other words, quality pantomime – included a proposed measure against what it called airlines’ ‘drip pricing’. Or, making it clear that the price to be paid by passengers from the outset. One report said that the measure would make flights £80 more expensive, but is that actually the case? It would capture the true costs at the start, not as you go, but how this will make fares higher is not clear. So that is a conflict that will play out first in the halls of parliament, with government and airline lobbyists and then, perhaps, in the small claims tribunals of Britain.
Pilots do not like being away from the centre of attention for long, so sure enough, on Wednesday our old friends, the eponymous European Cockpit Association (not a word, or indeed a half word of a lie, in their name) released another arrow from their quiver to show that low cost carriers are making aviation unsafe by asking pilots to, err, fly aeroplanes. You would think, listening to the pilots complain, that they were being asked to drive buses. Too cowed to show their faces, their voices or their employer, horrific story after horrific story comes forward in a new 45 minute video decrying the employment practices of the LCCs. There is only one problem with this narrative, all of the recent accidents, some of them fatal, and some nearly so, are with the full service carriers, not the LCCs. Still, this is a campaign to change the rules at EASA and in the Commission itself, so again, see you in the corridors of power.
No doubt not making the pilots rest any easier was the launching on Thursday by EASA of a new campaign to mitigate the impacts of climate change on flying, or at least increase understanding. Increased storms, increased turbulence, including clear air turbulence and increased fires and floods are likely, so EASA has started a network of experts and researchers to study and report on the issue. Highlighting the perennial issue for climate change – it is a disaster but it is not an imminent one, right now, when there are other urgent things to worry about: the confusion of the important with the urgent fallacy writ large – the network will report next year. No hurry then…
And then, on Friday the ECA nightmare, again. Is there a word for repeated, very similar nightmares? In any event, here we go again. A pilot from Alaska Air – a full service scheduled airline in the US, not an LCC – was charged with attempted murder of each of his 83 passengers and fellow crew after he attempted to shut down the engines mid-flight. His defence is that he was hallucinating on mushrooms at the time and thought that the crisis might wake him up. If not, then forcing open the door and jumping out might wake him up. He was, of course, tired and emotional, after an anniversary service for the death of a friend, which clearly is something that a full service carrier pilots attends only with the taking of psychedelic mushrooms [note to editor, check this point with the ECA]. We are in that temple of deconfliction, the US courts, for this one. You will be shocked, shocked to know that he is pleading not guilty. Of course he is!