That Was The Week That Was 09-13 October 2023
Wake up and smell the delays
It is tempting to note that this week, the week that was, was a perfect example of European aviation. Luton Airport was closed because of a fire in a car park. The initial assessment seems to be that an electric car literally overheated, and after the bonfire of this vanity car, the heat was so intense that the neighbouring cars then self-combusted as well. That started a chain reaction. Up went the cars, one after the other, as the heat approached along the line. A major fire in a multi-story car park is wrong on so many levels. (That is a re-working of an old Tim Vine joke; but was irresistible. Apologies to Tim.) In any event chaos ensued and the airport was closed. As sure as night follows day, this is going to turn into another set of cases in front of the European Court of Justice as passengers assert what they hope are their rights under Reg261 for cancelled flights.
You may recall that Reg 261 makes the airline responsible for delays, unless the delay was caused by ‘extraordinary circumstances’. Those well-known students of aviation and airline operations, their honours, the judges of the ECJ, have in the past held that a delay caused by a mechanical issue was not extraordinary, on the grounds that things fall apart, and the airlines should have been ready for that, and recently, that the death of the First Officer on a flight, and thus the need to have that person replaced with a not dead first officer, was also not extraordinary. One can only assume that it was a pretty extraordinary thing for the first officer involved, but their honours felt the airline was responsible for that delay too. The fire department at Luton has noted that this fire was accidental, but where does ‘accidental’ fit in the ordinary-to-extraordinary spectrum? Years of litigation ahoy!
There were also ATM strikes in bits of France, but not all of it, as there is just about every week. The French strikes are so normal now that we have indeed normalised them. Presumably, that is what the French controllers want. So normal are they that try as I might, I cannot find a link for you, but trust me, on Friday evening of this week, flights into Geneva were subject to rerouting to avoid the affected airspace and thus there were the inevitable delays.
The situation is now so severe that even before the fire and Friday’s strike, the Airlines Four Europe, as they insist on being called, or Airlines 4 Europe as they insist on being typed, noted that delays are up 400% on average, as capacity is being stretched and cannot keep up with demand. It would be interesting to know if there are mirrors in the bathrooms there at the A4E. If there are not, perhaps we should crowd fund the purchase of some, because then the airlines could benefit from having a good hard look at themselves.
The situation is very clear. Capacity costs. If you want capacity you must answer the question of who should pay for it. As a general comment, we have answered that question already in Europe. The user pays for it. Should the user also pay for the capacity to be expanded? The A4E clearly thinks not. Really? When does not over-investing in capacity – new ATM systems, new terminals and runways etc – become a 400% increase in costs?
We run the entire European (and the entire US/Canadian/Australian) network at near enough 100%. The network, the staff, the scheduling is as tight as a drum. A software upgrade gone wrong, the wrong data inserted in a flight plan or an outbreak of Covid at a tower, has catastrophic consequences. There is no slack in the system to fall back on. We have no spare controllers, just as
we have no stand-by aircraft and crews waiting to respond. With one exception. Ryanair builds a 45-minute firewall into its operations every day to cope with the inevitable. The most aggressively low-cost carrier of them all carries a firewall. Why? Because it knows that it saves money. It also operates a fleet of three business jets, for the same reason. As does Aldi, by the way.
Notwithstanding what IATA claims from its Economics 101 class about costs and demand – a rule it notes to be as strict a rule as that of gravity, sometimes, we need costs to go up. Yes, all other things being equal, higher input costs equals higher fares, equals lower demand, but when was the last time you were on an aircraft? Two years on from the pandemic, our assumptions about the demand for travel need updating. Once that is done, it should be clear that for these new, happy-to-pay-more passengers, service delivery matters. In other words, we need to make a system that is fit for purpose and capable, not one that relies on chicken wire and chewing gum to hold everything together. That is, frankly, no way to run a network. We need to add costs to the system to enhance reliability.
If there is one thing one can take away from this summer, it is that the passengers are not going away. Contrary to everything that the airlines have been trying to tell their regulators, adding some costs – theirs, their service providers’ – will not ruin aviation, and thus Western Civilisation, but enhance it. Why is this so hard to fathom? Yes, it runs in the face of the current orthodoxy, but so what? No great movement for change has ever not done that.
We are at the incumbency paradox. No incumbent wants change. By definition, the incumbents are the current winners. Why change a system that works? That is fine, insofar as it goes, but why should a regulator accept that argument? The airlines did not want airline deregulation in 1975. But there can be no dispute that deregulation of the aviation industry has brought about huge changes, and for the passenger, huge benefits. Now, it is time to pay the price for those benefits, those lower fares, that increased mobility. It is time for the aviation industry to provide a system that can cope with the challenges it is presented with and to continue to be the best it can be.
Failure to do so is not just a question of a bad review on TripAdvisor. It is somehow more existential than that. It adds to the concerns to the discussion about sustainability, as unfair as that might be. If the aviation industry cannot produce a customer focused face to the world, the world is likely to find reasons to oppose its operations. That is why delays matter. The world is watching, happy to pay more, but not so keen on rubbish service