That Was The Week That Was: 11 – 15 June

Written by Aviation Advocacy on 15 June 2018. Posted in Air navigation service providers, Air traffic management, Airlines, Airports

June is aviation trade association AGM month. IATA held theirs in Sydney the week before; CANSO followed up in Bangkok on Monday and Tuesday. The theme was data and how it might change things. For an independent observer on the ‘summit’ CANSO held on the Monday, it would seem that there is strong support for using email as an alternative to having to source goose feathers to make quills when you want to send a letter. Perhaps the delegates were so put off by the first presentation, from a CAPA economist that showed how unhelpful a bucket of data is with no intelligence applied to it. Picking up on that lazy lack of thought, the rest of the meeting talked data, not wisdom. What was missing was any look beyond how data can do things quicker. It might mean we can stop doing some things, or do things differently. That was one of the two elephant in the room: the conference logo was an elephant, suggesting that CANSO does have a sense of humour after all. But the real elephant is that data does not respect national boundaries. Another elephant is that aviation is really part of tourism. The tourism agenda is as important as the airlines’. Tourism’s ICAO, the UNWTO, met on Wednesday. What is on top of its agenda? Digitalisation. Or to use their words, ‘to create an ecosystem of government policies, funds and strategic projects that nurture disruptive ideas and entrepreneurship.’ Got to love the way ‘funds’ is snuck in there. Tax is perhaps the greatest elephant of all, so it is no mystery that New Zealand, the world centre of pomposity-bursting, pretention-busting and go-forward truth-telling introduced this week a tax on tourists, to pay for infrastructure. Probably not the funding the UNWTO had in mind. Still, they probably think, it is New Zealand, not a member of the UNWTO in any case. Unlike taxes (unless you are American), data does not respect national boundaries. Neither does air traffic control. National strikes have international implications and Ryanair was keen to point out that further strikes are going to have significant implications. Michael O’Leary was his usual reticent self on Thursday when he got out on the front foot against another round of French strikes. When O’Leary is about, it is a brave elephant that tries to remain quietly in the room. What CANSO refused to face was that digitalisation might mean that the controllers’ jobs are going to be, at best, different. So there can be no doubt that data is part of the future. And it needs to be. The European network calculated the amount of hours of delay the European ATM network would suffer this year – to make the number totally meaningless they reduce it to minutes per flight. Apparently your flight will, on average, suffer a 1.36 minute delay. Tell that to someone delayed for three hours. That is like the statistician with one foot on a block of ice and one in a bucket of boiling water – on average she is fine. But here is the thing – by this week, the system has used all of the anticipated delay minutes – for the entire year. The summer peak is ahead of us. That is why on Friday Eurocontrol started to warn people. Bad news being hard to digest, they attempted to do it funny – brave call – with a lapse into George Gershwin. ‘Summertime’ Eamonn Brennan crooned, channelling his inner Ella Fitzgerald, ‘and the traffic is growing. Airports are busy and delays could be high’. As high as an elephant’s eye. There is that elephant again, getting into rooms around the world. Maybe Eurocontrol should consider changing its logo.

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