That Was The Week That Was 11-15 October 2021
What defines ‘aviation’?
You might think that a funny question to ask, given that it is the Aviation Advocacy blog, but the question is top of mind after several years spent listening to four days of unceasing platitudes from the International Civil Aviation Organisation (there is that word again). It is one of the mysteries of Montreal that it hides within it a black hole, a site that should gather scientists and physicists from around the world to marvel and to study. It might even be being used now by spies and securities forces and their opponents as a means to bend time. It is a remarkable thing.
In the before times, when an aviation organisation expected delegates to fly to their meetings, it was already reality redefining. Or reality denying. ICAO is a machine that makes a week-long meeting seem like the longest month of your life. But they were only getting started. Now, they can make a two week virtual meeting (time check for those at the meeting at the moment – you are halfway through) seem interminable. Life and time are on a continuum that probably had no beginning, knows no end and makes clocks work backwards.
But that is the easy part. ICAO has picked it up a notch. Not content to warp time, it is moving into the much more complex time-space vortex. Not only is the current High Level Conference on COVID interminable, it is warping space. Watch closely and you might see that Madrid moves to Montreal.
There have been rumours for some time that the UN World Tourism Organisation was to move from Madrid. IT would seem that Montreal is putting its hand up to merge the organisations. If taking the first week of dull, tedious and pious speeches to heart, it is clear that ICAO is not an aviation organisation, it is a tourism organisation. The pandemic has stopped tourism; it has stopped families getting together; it has stopped the world singing in tune. All very true and very sad; but frankly, not a lot to do with aviation. Tourism, sure, but not aviation.
There have been pushes over the years to create the concept of ‘travelism’ which would bring the various arms of the entire industry together. Together, travel and tourism accounts for about 10% of the world economy, so there is something in doing so and making its combined features a force, but that would call for a certain amount of give, as well as take.
At the start of the Covid crisis, ICAO convened the unsurpassably named committee, the CART – the Council Aviation Recovery Taskforce – to get in front of the runaway horse of the Covid pandemic. It met, in panicky behind-closed-digital-doors sessions some months ago and produced a series of self-contradictory and banal conclusions that were treated with the respect they deserved. They were ignored wholesale. Ahead of the conference, the secretariat circulated the draft final declaration. You would be mistaken for thinking that it must have gone through at least one draft, except that two drafts emerged.
Individual sections are self-contradictory. Vaccination is very important and people that are not vaccinated should be allowed to travel just like the vaccinated. No, do not leave yet, there are plenty more like that. What about the bit where we acknowledge and are grateful for the leadership shown by ICAO, and in particular the Council in the crisis? In other words, the Council acknowledges and thanks the Council for its unceasing effort and leadership.
But the draft declaration is completely silent on, for example, the role of cargo in the crisis. It is beyond argument that the role the cargo industry played in getting those (take them or leave them) vaccines and other supplies around the world is closer to the conventional definition of ‘unceasing’ than that of work done by the Council. It is also much, much closer to the definition of aviation.
Archaeologists, at some point in the future, considering the site of a black hole that was hidden in plain sight in downtown Montreal, will find this draft declaration, connect it to an infinite hole in the universe and realise that this was the very moment we moved a step closer to in fact making digital travel possible. Our first attempt to teleport Madrid and do the aviation industry out of a job.