That Was The Week That Was 12-16 September 2022
Form an orderly queue
Have you ever thought about the word queue? It is a sort of visual onomatopoeia. In other words, it looks like what is describing. ‘Queue’ looks like a queue. You have the first letter, the Q, which frankly is all you need, and then there are four more letters, patiently standing in a row behind it.
What is it about queues? Why are they so fascinating? Much of the English-speaking world, and sadly much of the non-English speaking world too for that matter, seems to have obsessed about a particular queue, the The Queue, all week. It beggars belief that is has not been called Quey McQueueface yet. Still, there it is, visible on every television in the world. There are reports that even if you cannot see it from the moon, you can see the moon from the queue.
For us in aviation, queues are sooooo last summer. We were getting people match fit for queueing all summer. Did we get any credit for it? Did we hell. What the airports did not do was pin a drawing of a random royal to the front of their queues. A miscue, clearly. That would have quelled complaint.
The true aviation angle on the entire performative mourning we have been subject to, subject or no of her Maj, is not queueing – at least not pleb queueing, it is the instruction to the world’s heads of state, prime ministers and others that they should arrive in London by commercial carrier and use a complementary bus service to get to Westminster Abbey for the service. It seems that there is nothing you can say to make a complementary bus service sufficiently complimentary for some of these self-assessed very important egos. More than one high profile nose was put out of joint, but for the French minster of aviation, Clement Beaune it was an ill wind that blows no good etc…
M Beaune made news in the summer (and as we reported in the Aviation Intelligence Reporter) by proposing a ban on private aviation. If your Monarch/President/Prime Minister can fly commercial, he will now say, why can’t you? To be fair to Beaune, wiser heads seem to have prevailed and the ban is now working its way into a tax increase – much better for the exchequer – but battle has been joined. The discussion is now out in the open.
The debate about private aviation has for many years trod a fine line between arguments of excess and excess emissions on the one hand, and biz-av being a test bed for new fuels, new procedures and new systems on the other; between the high productivity of on demand flying versus the undeniable proof that whilst often you would not want to sit beside these people on a plane, they most certainly would not want to sit beside you.
It will be fascinating to see how many comply with the request for sensible, respectful observance of this particular airspace and crowd and traffic control hygiene.