That Was The Week That Was 03-07 January 2022
The Centre Cannot Hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, as Yeats noted, in The Second Coming. Things fall apart. Welcome to the second coming of 2021. Or is it the third coming of 2020?
Normally, one would be excused for writing 600 words on what to expect this year. But what can a satirist say that is as funny as real life? I did contemplate writing a 2022 bingo card of all the things you are likely to read about this year, but again…
Nonetheless, we are where we are; and that is at the very moment when the new year bonhomie clears, the calendar turns over and we face the new year only to discover what? But of course! A mash-up of not just slots but slots intermingled with sustainability! Can 2022 top this in the mere 51 weeks it now has left? A lot of 2022 bingo cards are already all but filled. All we need now is to intermingle slots and Digital Covid Certificates, or perhaps airport charges and ATM reform and we will have aviation players around Europe screaming Bingo! What is a bingo card writer to do?
Who, who could have predicted that straight out of the blocks the legacy carriers could have put the cause of aviation back by at least a decade with a single great idea? Cheers, gang.
Europe’s airlines know that sustainability is going to be big this year. It was big last year too, of course, but you ain’t seen nothing yet. Realising that, Lufthansa decided to use the environmental secret sauce to attack liberalisation of slot rules. Are you still following? Boy, did that backfire. They assumed that if they noted because of the, sensible, adjustment to the slot rule – shifting the use it or lose it ratio from 80% to 50% rather than ignore any obligations whatsoever – their argument that they would be forced to fly ‘Ghost Flights’ would so anger the sustainability crowd that the Commission would gift them back all their slots, in perpetuity. Extra marks for ‘ghost flights’ too. Very spooky.
The Commission, on the other hand, has a broader policy agenda to consider and that includes the introduction, or at least the fostering, of competition. The slot rules are an anomaly in modern aviation, first introduced to preserve the status quo just as the status quo was being shaken up forever. Nonetheless, they survive, buried deep in the structure of the industry, bolstered by the understanding that fixing them might be more trouble than they are worth if you are a national regulator. Kudos to Brussels for slowly attempting that change, in the shadow of the pandemic.
Once the Commission is involved, the Lufthansa machine moved to DefCon 2, in which they rile up national politicians. Big mistake. The first week of January is the very definition of a low news week, so once they got involved there was an explosion of press coverage, but, surprise surprise, not much of it focused on the intricacies of slot regulations – it wasn’t that slow a news week – but increasingly on the airlines and aircraft more generally.
Stop me if you know the next bit: Greta tweeted about it. Hell has no fury like Greta’s followers, a mere several million of them. To date it has more than 8K likes. If your bingo card has ‘circular firing squad’ on it, you are close but have not won. The winning entry here is: complaining about a temporary alteration to the slot threshold for the remainder of the W21 season in exchange for trashing the industry’s reputation. Congratulations to our winners.