Monday, June 8th, 2009

IATA goes back to the KL

When all else fails, KL will pop up for an IATA meeting – this week it is the AGM.  And a flood of press releases has been raining down on us.  The first, least happy of course being the doubling of the losses.  These are hard times for airlines.

Most entertaining was the new deadline for airlines to go carbon neutral – you may remember that the old challenge was 2050.  A good date that, well into someone else’s watch.  Now, the deadline has   been brought forward to 2020.  Why did they choose that date I wonder.  Wait a minute, could it be that someone somewhere inside the bowels of IATA realised that the rest of the world had been talking about that as our target date for action under the new CopenhagenProtocol (lovingly known as Kyoto2 – not sure who would be the more surprised to discover they were being compared with the other as cities) for about, oh, let me see, oh, 3 years.

Never knowingly late our friends at IATA.

It is part of a bigger picture, one that sees IATA move 180 degrees on the environment – whilst never losing sight of the famous 4 pillars of course.  Thank heavens they did not call them principles.