“It really is a big deal,” says Andrew Charlton, an aviation analyst. “The cost of its hub going down is enormous and the ripple effect down the entire operations will take about 14 days to work out of the system. Aircraft are in the wrong place, the crew are in the wrong place, connections are lost, there is a need to find ways to re-accommodate passengers. It will go on and on.”
Link to Financial Times“It’s more than just simply saying we know you’ve got a booking and therefore we’re going to issue you with a boarding pass,” said Andrew Charlton, the managing director of the Aviation Advocacy consulting firm and a former chief legal officer at Qantas, the Australian airline.
Link to The New York TimesSecond, geography has turned sharply against them. When Sir Tim Clark, president of Emirates, helped Dubai’s government to set up the airline in 1985, he was quick to spot that a third of the world’s population lives within four hours’ flight of Dubai, and two-thirds within eight. “They were in the right place at the right time,” says Andrew Charlton of Aviation Advocacy, a consultancy. “But now they’ve been caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.” A series of terror attacks in the region and a coup in Turkey last July has prompted many passengers to shun airports in the Middle East and to go elsewhere to change planes. The latest figure (from March) for capacity utilisation for Middle Eastern airlines was just 73%, the lowest since 2006 and worse than at the height of the financial crisis in 2008-09.
Link to The EconomistCalling the move by Emirates an “inevitable” one, Andrew Charlton, managing director of Geneva-based Aviation Advocacy, said it would help Emirates cut costs. “And more importantly, it will let them correctly cut their suit to match their cloth. Or trim their network to match their passengers. In other words, it was the right move in the circumstances,” he told Gulf News by email.
Link to Gulf NewsAn example of what might be possible comes from the European Parliament. As Aviation Intelligence Reporter revealed in January, Polish MEP Pavel Telicka discovered a little-known provision in the framework legislation for the Single European Sky: permission for a single upper airspace flight information region for all of the E.U. AIR‘s editor, Andrew Charlton, described the potential as follows:
“The single pan-European upper airspace FIR . . . would extend across all of Europe. The analogy that everyone uses is a superhighway. . . . No longer would flights that go over, but not into, France be subject to the increasingly frequent industrial action [strikes] the various French controllers’ unions call. . . . [S]uch a proposal would facilitate making en-route services more competitive. The EU FIR can be controlled from anywhere, for all of Europe. Maybe, in the interests of ensuring back-up and competition in the provision of these services, you could split Europe into three or four [upper area] FIRs, and have a back-up provider on standby. ANSPs could bid for providing these services for fixed periods of time.”
Link to Reason Foundation
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