That Was The Week That Was 14-18 September
When clowns and metaphors cannot beat unprecedented calls for action.
Last week, pre-emptively, we declared Metaphor Week. Oh how little did we know! Qantas then proceeded to play its metaphor card. Boom! Now, surely, even metaphors about metaphor week can be safely retired – on Monday Qantas not only went and won Metaphor of Aviation week, it won Metaphor of Aviation 2020. IT offered revenue flights to nowhere. They sold out in ten minutes. Yes, if you were quick enough, you could have booked a sightseeing flight on a Qantas B787 for $787 in economy, $1,787 in premium economy and $2,787 in business class – see what they did there? – to go and look at the Great Barrier Reef. Before climate change brought about by excess emissions destroys it, environmental campaigners added, with no sense of irony at all.
Nothing else that happened on Monday could start to top that, even though what else happened on Monday included the decision by the European Commission to extend the waiver on the application of the slot rules, so we moved on to Tuesday. What on earth could the Europeans do to top the Aussies? Well, by getting serious. The German Aviation Research Society, which in normal times runs the great aviation conferences has been running a series of webinairs [and yes, full disclosure, Aviation Advocacy and the ATM Policy Institute are involved] ran a webinair where, remarkably, 90 minutes was too short. Significantly, it did two things – first, Brian Pearce of IATA firmly put the fact that significant reform is required squarely on the agenda, and secondly, Mike Tretheway of Intervistas acknowledged that we need to consider and reshape competition law to properly analyse the impacts of what is going on. Expect this to be addressed in more detail in the next Aviation Intelligence Reporter, but in a nutshell he notes that currently, we are terrible at analysing network industries generally and one where the service is perishable in particular.
But, whilst the Europeans were being serious, the Aussies were at it again! Not content to win the metaphor crown, they went all out for the Clown Crown as well! What can Europe do to come back from this attack from the Antipodes? To say that serious game lifting is required is to downplay how much game lifting will be need to top the former prime minister, Tony Abbott’s boastfully showing off a boarding pass on Instagram, which in turn allowed an ethical hacker to obtain his passport and mobile phone numbers. You may recall Tony; he was the subject of the blistering misogyny speech from then PM Julia Gillard, the man who gave Prince Philip an Australian knighthood and who, by being appointed as the Brexiting UK’s Trade Advisor and thus relocating to the UK, improved the IQs of both the UK and Australia. The serious point, of course, is that the security around PNRs, boarding passes and airline websites, known for a long time (where on earth is Carman Sandiego? this ethical hacker asked in 2016, and the Aviation Intelligence Reporter covered) but still nothing is done.
It would seem that you have two options when considering the way that aviation can recover. You can, as mentioned above, start to think about serious, structural reform – we favour a new international convention to replace the Chicago Convention – or you can run on, forward, ever faster. The airports have opted for the second plan. On Wednesday it tabled its plan (in conjunction with the Duty Free World Council) – more cheap alcohol! To be fair, the thought of more well-priced whiskey is not to be discounted.
Thursday saw a second group opt for what might be called the Duty-Free-in-Abundance strategy – and when all else fails you can depend on Astroturf associations to come to the rescue – when that most Astroturf of all European Astroturf organisations, Europeans 4 Fair Competition came in behind the German pilots’ union – sorry, I am sure they want you to think of them as a professional association – which call for the shelving the revised EU Qatar Air Services Agreement. Where to start? First, E4FC, apart from showing an appalling lack of spelling – looking at you too A4E – was established to fight any concession to the Gulf carriers. It was organised as a sister organisation of a US entity, ‘Americans for Fair Skies’ – who likes to fly through thunder storms? – by one Captain Lee Moak, who now also serves on the board of the US Post Office. Do not take our word for it, others too realise just how hypercritical it is. Secondly, the call is that now is the not the time for competition. Really? Imagine this thought exercise: what would they have said if there was no pandemic. Exactly: now is not the time. Le plus ça change…
There can be no doubt that serious structural reform is needed in aviation, but that does not mean that serious structural reform is not needed elsewhere too. All of the major aviation groups, and indeed the entire travel and tourism industry got together on Friday to issue a call for regulators to lift their game too. Fair enough. They demand that the states of Europe and the European Union get together to coordinate testing and border openings to allow as much travel as usual. There has been an unprecedented use of the word unprecedented recently and this call too described itself as an unprecedented call for action. As Europe faces an increasingly uncertain autumn and the risk of a second wave, the harder everyone can work together, the better it will be.