That Was The Week That Was 29 November-03 December
Tell The Truth!
I have railed before, some might say too much, at the fact that the aviation industry is much too often ‘truth adjacent’. That is of course a very polite way to say that we are hopeless at telling the truth. As with so much about aviation, this fundamental sin can, in part, be sheeted home to the Chicago Convention System. Strictly not the Convention itself, but the often-impenetrable miasma that surrounds it. The much vaunted ‘Freedoms of the Air’ are actually restrictions. Freedoms sounds just so much better, doesn’t it?
What about code shares? Well indeed, what about code shares. The one thing that is not shared in a code share are the codes. Each airline keeps its own, regardless of who operates the flight.
You might argue that these are in the past. They are but we still use the expressions. We seem to have learnt nothing in nearly 80 years.
Much worse than that, we are still at it! Is there nothing that we will not lie about? One might think that on the matter of sustainability we would fear being shown up by environmentalists that are on the look out for porkies. But old habits run deep. After all, we have been pretending to be worried about sustainability for decades now. You can call it greenwashing, or you can call it off-setting. Take your pick.
But, turning the mendaciousity-meter up to 11 this week, the week that was, enter United. For a long time, United had their own entry in the never-tell-the-truth stakes by describing one of their products as ‘Business Class,’ but recently they have worked on that. Obviously worried that they would fall of out contention, this week, with much fanfare and getting all sorts of Important People to wave the aircraft off, or greet the aircraft, they announced, and the media lapped up, the first 100% SAF flight in history. World famous in the USA anyway.
But, and this is a big, very big, but, it was not a 100% SAF flight. One of the engines was powered by SAF, the other by good old Jet A1. So, at best it was a 50% SAF flight.
Last week, at a Eurocontrol Summit on Sustainability, the DG of Eurocontrol rued the fact that whilst aviation is about 3% of global emissions – so is Germany, by the way – the public seems to think that it is about 35%.
There is a solution to that: tell the bloody truth.