{"id":1038,"date":"2020-09-06T20:24:25","date_gmt":"2020-09-06T18:24:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aviationadvocacy.aero\/blog\/?p=1038"},"modified":"2020-09-06T20:24:25","modified_gmt":"2020-09-06T18:24:25","slug":"that-was-the-month-that-was-were-all-going-on-a-summer-staycation-no-more-working-for-a-week-or-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aviationadvocacy.aero\/blog\/?p=1038","title":{"rendered":"That Was The Month That Was: We\u2019re all going on a Summer Staycation, No more working for a week or two…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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Well, that was an August.\u00a0 The August of the staycation.<\/strong>\u00a0
The bail-outs kept bailing, the borders kept closing and the rumour mill of border closures must have been close to meltdown in the summer sun.\u00a0 Or summer heat wave, depending on where you were.\u00a0 Hot, in any event.\u00a0 Some of us can remember when \u2018summer lockdown\u2019 meant that Brussels was deserted and there was simply no news or things to monitor.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
The heat was supposed to slow the virus down, but there seemed to be little sign of that.\u00a0 Belgium, Croatia, France, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain all seemed to be on the end of rumours or actual lockdowns or returning quarantines and\/or quarantines for returning holiday makers during the summer.\u00a0 It was hard to know what was going on and what the rules were.\u00a0 Instead, we were treated to a competition of how quickly quarantine periods could be imposed; and at what cost of chaos?\u00a0 Right now, in a couple of days, or was the threat of quarantine enough to stymie any recovery for the tourism sector?\u00a0 In the UK returning passengers needed 15 days, in Switzerland 10 days was enough.\u00a0 But with gold ribbon quality, UK bans were, at least at first, announced late on a Saturday on Twitter, for implementation from 0400 the next morning.
However, there are a few things on which you could depend on in Europe this August.\u00a0 It is summer, so there is nobody in Brussels.\u00a0 It is summer, so the beaches are heaving, with our without the risk of a pandemic.\u00a0 It is summer, so the very last thing the regulators do is send out consultation documents for reply in early September.\u00a0 Their holiday is assured; yours, maybe less so.\u00a0

First cab off the rank was strictly not a consultation, it was an Inception Impact Assessment<\/a> on updating the rules for the EU ETS\u2019s coverage of aviation.\u00a0 This is always vexed and there was pile in from all sides.\u00a0 We will review and analyse some of that in the Aviation Intelligence Reporter<\/strong><\/em> in the months ahead.

We were then asked our opinion on a consultation<\/a> on the possible reform of the CRS Code of Conduct \u2013 that code is a phoenix, or a shape-shifter, or some other Harry Potter reference I am too old to know.\u00a0 First, it was about regulating airlines abusing the travel agents\u2019 laziness by distorting the screen displays on their own systems.\u00a0 A number of crises ago the airlines sold out of their share of CRS \u2013 although then American CEO Robert Crandell spent much of the rest of his tenure wondering why he sold Sabre and not the airline.\u00a0 Since then it has been a battleground for airline-on-agent warfare, agent-on-agent warfare and now agent-on-airline warfare.\u00a0 More accurately it is agent on airline-owned New Distribution Capacity warfare and so we go the full circle, only, like an Escher drawing, somehow, we seem to be inside out.\u00a0

Your final option to feel duly consulted with came with the mother of all consultations<\/a>, or at least the consultation that tries to mother as many as possible topics; looking at the digital agenda, the sustainability agenda and the Covid response agenda.\u00a0 A buy one-get-two-free offer to talk about smart, sustainable and resilient transport.\u00a0 See what they did there?\u00a0 Instead of digital transport \u2013 data over the internet, perhaps? \u2013 we are talking about smart transport.\u00a0 Green transport \u2013 that faint hope for the far off \u2013 has become sustainable transport.\u00a0 And surviving the crisis is now resilient transport.\u00a0 You can still dive into this one.\u00a0 Open to late September.

It is easy to be cynical, but there is something worth considering here.\u00a0 There is a confluence of technologies, the most important of which are new, more powerful, batteries and electric motors, that is driving at least three new markets \u2013 city-to-city commuter services using conventional airfields, urban air mobility and express air delivery \u2013 which will have a significant impact on the European landscape.\u00a0 These three new markets are being aggressively promoted by North American and Chinese governments, which are vying to be world leaders in these domains so that too is worth keeping an eye on.\u00a0

Many of the issues these new aircraft induce, like the services on offer, are local.\u00a0 Cities and other government bodies have never had a significant role in aviation apart from concerns about runway operations and noise.\u00a0 A new association, CIVATAglobal<\/a> [full disclosure: Aviation Advocacy is involved] is bringing local governments and this nascent industry together.\u00a0 Watch this space…

The other busy people were at DG COMP, approving applications for state aid from airlines across Europe.\u00a0 They must not have had an easy summer.\u00a0 IATA calculates that so far there has been about $180B yes, billion dollars, spent bailing out the airlines.\u00a0 That is globally, not just in Europe, but the numbers are starting to stack up.\u00a0 So far so good… seems to be the industry\u2019s response as they currently operate about half their fleets with a load factor of about 58%.\u00a0 And this, to remind, is the high season.

What has not been happening so far is much in the way of reform.\u00a0 There is a wonderful hope that things will just spring back to \u2018normal\u2019 and we do not need to think about the structural issues at all.\u00a0 And with the hope that the new normal is just going to be the old normal, only with more tax payer money, we turn again to the coalface of the second half of the year.<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, that was an August.\u00a0 The August of the staycation.\u00a0The bail-outs kept bailing, the borders kept closing and the rumour mill of border closures must have been close to meltdown in the summer sun.\u00a0 Or summer heat wave, depending on where you were.\u00a0 Hot, in any event.\u00a0 Some of us can remember when \u2018summer lockdown\u2019 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,11,40,21,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-airlines","category-airports","category-covid-19","category-disaster-relief","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aviationadvocacy.aero\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aviationadvocacy.aero\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aviationadvocacy.aero\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aviationadvocacy.aero\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aviationadvocacy.aero\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1038"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.aviationadvocacy.aero\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1038\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1039,"href":"https:\/\/www.aviationadvocacy.aero\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1038\/revisions\/1039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aviationadvocacy.aero\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aviationadvocacy.aero\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aviationadvocacy.aero\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}