That Was The Week That Was – 15-19 November
An apology whilst the industry played chicken (and egg)
Last week’s post, which tried to make fun of one of the worst slogans ever dreamed of by a – almost certainly extremely well-paid – advertising executive, that of Chevron telling the world that it was using ‘human energy’ upset many people, for obvious reasons, albeit understood only in retrospect by me. It is no excuse that it was late on a Sunday night. All I can do is to apologise for my lapse of taste and sensitivity. To be fair to Chevron, perhaps this is what they had in mind when they talked of human energy.
As tasteless as the tag is, the issues that underlie the change in energy supply are plain to see. What we cannot yet see is very much of this fuel being seen in the plane. So this week, the week that was, we saw another round in the seemingly endless game of pass the buck. But we did it by setting that deepest of philosophical questions: which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Flush with the success of thinking that aviation had again dodged the bullet at COP26 in Glasgow with the asinine Aviation Declaration – and what a win it is to see the sustainability question resting peacefully there at ICAO. There is no risk that it will be disturbed there, or raise its ugly head to make life hard. Not only was ICAO back in the driver’s seat, or perhaps more accurately, in the crew rest area, but our old friend the ‘aspirational goal’ gets another run.
But, that is not enough. What if someone comes along and stirs the beast? What if some of those pesky environmental NGOs get a bit shirty? The declaration clearly needs to be tied down better than that. So, on Monday, straight out of the blocks, IATA welcomed that declaration and adroitly put it beside their resolution from Boston. Indeed more than that, they noted that it was good that the regulators had finally come up to the industry’s standard. We can now see that government and industry are aligned, or at least that is the message we are being asked to see, to a document with no interim milestones, no targets and mere aspirations. That was very fancy footwork.
But it all falls down when, in the next breath, you then note that we can only go forward when someone else pays for what is needed. But before we get to that chicken and egg moment, we detour via another such chicken and egg conundrum, in the arcane but fundamental world of ground handling. This is an area too where the airlines, which once did the ground handling themselves and on a reciprocal basis for the bilateral partners started to outsource the services in the interests of encouraging competition and lowering prices.
Or, to put that another way, after years of demanding lower costs and cheaper services, on Tuesday the airlines demanded more staff be deployed, with better standards. Just think. You offer low pay and staff just show no loyalty. Which to tackle first, you may wonder…
Wednesday saw the winding up of the Dubai Air Show, where once again, it was hard to move without using the word ‘sustainable’, but unfortunately, we also had to use the words ‘Covid safe’ which meant that most everything that was being handed out or passed around needed to come in single use plastic wrapping. Even the daily show magazines which talked about how green was my industry came wrapped in single use plastics. There were, unsurprisingly, few new orders, but those that were booked marked two interesting data points. First, the big order was for a group of low cost carriers, which came out of the pandemic on the up, and most intriguingly, Airbus signed a reasonably order for large cargo aircraft with the A350F. That reflects the new respect we have for cargo in aviation now, and marks a new flank on the Airbus-Boeing battlefield. Watch this space.
But by Thursday it was back to chicken and egg. Which should come first, the requirement that SAFs be mandated for use, or the fuel itself? For Willie Walsh of IATA, this is no contest. It is ‘madness’ to mandate something if there is not enough of it. This is a brave position. The Commission takes the view that only with a mandate will there be the legal incentive to change; the fuel industry says there is plenty of feedstock but we need clear regulatory guidelines to commit to the cost of scaling up the production; the entire story sold to keep on avoiding further demands for decarbonisation in Europe are based on the ReFuelEU aviation package, which ignores the Fit for 55 targets on the grounds that aviation is special, but hinges on mandates. Actually, when you look deeper into the Walsh’s position, you can see, as it most usually does, that it comes back to money.
The mandate being introduced pre-emptively would increase the cost of fuel. SAFs are about three times the cost of Jet A1. This would act as a most pernicious tax, because it would increase costs without even improving education, roads or public health, let alone aviation. Not that IATA cares about education, roads or public health. All it cares about is the cost of fuel. Yet again, we note that a decade ago, indeed a year ago, IATA should have got pre-emptive and started its own industry surcharge to be able to funnel the money to development and research. They look before and aft, they long for what is not, as Milton put it.
The final chicken and egg conundrum of the week was on Friday when the question became, which came first, the recovery or the holiday? The European Parliament’s Transport and Tourism Committee requested a study to try to resolve this knotty problem. For tourism, the answer is that they are both perfectly encapsulated in each other. The travel and tourism industry needs everyone in the travel and tourism industry to go on holiday!
Good advice, I am sure we can all agree.