That Was The Week That Was 21-25 June 2021
Business As Usual In An Age Of The New Normal
The aviation ecosystem, or aviation value network, if you prefer, is slowly coming back to life, and for all the talk of building back better, there are few signs yet that we know what that better might actually look like. Some, ok, me, hoped that we would use this opportunity to not use try to prop up the status quo but actually change things. It seems that such a hope clings on, even if you have to go far and wide to find it. In New Zealand, the framework for services provided by Airways NZ – no not a particularly virulent respiratory disease, but an ANSP – is consulting and accepts that tower services should be competitively offered. A small step but one that opens some parts of the ATM market to competition, which is a good thing… Feel free to comment here.
But, before you get too excited, business as old normal will be restored if Lufthansa has any say in it. The airline which nearly refused state aid on the grounds that it came with a condition of seats on the board for the investor (Germany itself) and that a government is a terrible manager, is now demanding that airports are much better managed by, wait for it, governments! On Monday, Lufthansa’s CEO Carsten Spohr told the on-line version of the Paris Air Show that he wants the value chain to continue to do nothing but lower his costs.
According to Eurocontrol, slowly, aircraft are coming out of their hibernation, as summer flights are starting to pick up. On Tuesday it released its data snapshot of the situation now. From a peak – or is that pit? – of nearly 7,200 aircraft being mothballed, or as Eurocontrol charmingly calls them, ‘asleep’, the number is now only 3,384 sleepy head aircraft out there still slumbering.
It is hard to say where tourism sits in the aviation ecosystem. We love tourists when they fly, we ignore them otherwise. But one thing we can applaud them for is a more gentle, sustainable approach to language. We always, always, demand a roadmap for anything we do, mixing metaphors with abandon. The team at DG GROW have found a much more suitable term for its work to bring tourism into the new normal of green and digital life. On Wednesday it announced that it is not seeking a roadmap, it is seeking a pathway. That sounds so much nicer. A pathway. You are nearly already on holidays when you seek a pathway. There is a background paper too, incidentally, in case you wish to take your virtual summer holiday searching for this pathway – which sadly might be the best on offer.
But in this battle between a new normal and an old normal, on Thursday EASA struck a blow for Team New, by issuing design verification for drone operator Volvocopter. This is a huge step forward and does, inevitably mean there will be differences either side of the pandemic, even if has nothing to do with Covid per se.
The week ended with a wonderful mixture of old and new normal. On Friday the possibly unimprovably named trade association the European Waste-to-Advanced Biofuels Association (or EWABA to its friends) warned that any EU mandate for the use of animal fats and used cooking oils in sustainable aviation fuel is set to enrich large biofuel players such as Total and Neste Oil, at the expense of most of the industry. Thus does old and new come full circle. Even in SAFs we risk ending up with an oligarchy.