That Was The Month That Was: We’re all going on a Summer Staycation, No more working for a week or two…
Well, that was an August. The August of the staycation. 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. Or summer heat wave, depending on where you were. Hot, in any event. Some of us can remember when ‘summer lockdown’ meant that Brussels was deserted and there was simply no news or things to monitor. The heat was supposed to slow the virus down, but there seemed to be little sign of that. 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. It was hard to know what was going on and what the rules were. Instead, we were treated to a competition of how quickly quarantine periods could be imposed; and at what cost of chaos? Right now, in a couple of days, or was the threat of quarantine enough to stymie any recovery for the tourism sector? In the UK returning passengers needed 15 days, in Switzerland 10 days was enough. 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. It is summer, so there is nobody in Brussels. It is summer, so the beaches are heaving, with our without the risk of a pandemic. It is summer, so the very last thing the regulators do is send out consultation documents for reply in early September. Their holiday is assured; yours, maybe less so. First cab off the rank was strictly not a consultation, it was an Inception Impact Assessment on updating the rules for the EU ETS’s coverage of aviation. This is always vexed and there was pile in from all sides. We will review and analyse some of that in the Aviation Intelligence Reporter in the months ahead. We were then asked our opinion on a consultation on the possible reform of the CRS Code of Conduct – that code is a phoenix, or a shape-shifter, or some other Harry Potter reference I am too old to know. First, it was about regulating airlines abusing the travel agents’ laziness by distorting the screen displays on their own systems. A number of crises ago the airlines sold out of their share of CRS – although then American CEO Robert Crandell spent much of the rest of his tenure wondering why he sold Sabre and not the airline. Since then it has been a battleground for airline-on-agent warfare, agent-on-agent warfare and now agent-on-airline warfare. 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. Your final option to feel duly consulted with came with the mother of all consultations, 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. A buy one-get-two-free offer to talk about smart, sustainable and resilient transport. See what they did there? Instead of digital transport – data over the internet, perhaps? – we are talking about smart transport. Green transport – that faint hope for the far off – has become sustainable transport. And surviving the crisis is now resilient transport. You can still dive into this one. Open to late September. It is easy to be cynical, but there is something worth considering here. 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 – city-to-city commuter services using conventional airfields, urban air mobility and express air delivery – which will have a significant impact on the European landscape. 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. Many of the issues these new aircraft induce, like the services on offer, are local. Cities and other government bodies have never had a significant role in aviation apart from concerns about runway operations and noise. A new association, CIVATAglobal [full disclosure: Aviation Advocacy is involved] is bringing local governments and this nascent industry together. Watch this space… The other busy people were at DG COMP, approving applications for state aid from airlines across Europe. They must not have had an easy summer. IATA calculates that so far there has been about $180B yes, billion dollars, spent bailing out the airlines. That is globally, not just in Europe, but the numbers are starting to stack up. So far so good… seems to be the industry’s response as they currently operate about half their fleets with a load factor of about 58%. And this, to remind, is the high season. What has not been happening so far is much in the way of reform. There is a wonderful hope that things will just spring back to ‘normal’ and we do not need to think about the structural issues at all. 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. |