That Was The Week That Was 20-24 June 2022
Aviation United
Never has aviation been this united. It is usually a bit united, because for some unwritten rule no-one has ever seen, but all must obey, we have all the trade association annual general meetings of in the same month. But now, with the inevitable Covid related acceleration effect taking hold, that month has become one week! The unwritten rule has been rewritten. Only the very tough, very resilient and very devoted were able to get the trifecta of Doha for the IATA shindig, Madrid for the CANSO AGM and World ATM Congress festivities and the ACI-Europe knees-up in Rome. Hats off to Eamonn Brennan and Henrik Hololei who did just that.
If may have been mutual magnetism that saw everything squeezed into one week, but that was where the unity finished. From then on, it was every part of the ecosystem for itself. Airports blamed airlines for the current chaos at the airports, Eurocontrol, doing a lap of honour on how accurately their traffic forecasts turned out to be, told the airports to look in the mirror, and everyone marvelled that we already have capacity crunches looming in the sky this summer.
Subscribers to my Aviation Intelligence Reporter will get detailed reports of all the fun and festivities, as well as serious content, but highlights must include airline CEOs being entertained by JLo in an airconditioned arena, whilst their passengers would have settled for having cake thrown at them by the airline CEOs; Europe’s airport CEOs being required to sit in an old terminal in Rome on standard airport seating – two days of walking a mile in their passengers’ shoes was more than enough for most of them; and, taking the cake, CANSO deciding that it was going to do much more on global warming. Unfortunately, they described this as ‘bringing the heat’ to a topic that really does not want more heat.
As we remarked last week, McKinsey (aviation consultants to the gentry) has branded this sudden upsurge in passengers ‘revenge travel’. We all wondered at the time revenge on whom? As aviation industry execs go on a European tour to various AGM locations and tourists from all over the world flock to airports, hotels and holiday destinations it just might be revenge on the entire travel and tourism industry for failing to build back better when it had the chance. Or is it some sort of new manifestation of nationalism, taking revenge on globalisation by making it clear that all this international travel and cooperation can be very uncomfortable? The passengers feel punished, the staff at airports are being abused and stretched to braking point, very soon the entire system will not cope again. We will be crying out for another crisis to ease the strain.
Still, for the airline CEOs, if JLo was not to their taste, they could bop to Christina Aguilera. For a week that saw all of aviation’s meetings jammed into this one week, the week that was, each making their own choices in accordance to their tastes was the only unification on view.