That Was The Week That Was 09-13 November
A week when aviation got back to what it does best – epidemiology
After a week moonlighting as expert psephologists – what was the impact of the late returns from Beaver County going to do for the final Pennsylvania count? we all pondered – it was great to get back to doing what we do best this week – epidemiology.
Monday started with everyone digesting the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine announcement. Now is a good time to pause and admire the quality of Pfizer’s trolling of President Trump. Imagine the C-Suite at East 42nd St in New York as the positive results started coming through. Pfizer’s offices are around the corner from the UN Headquarters. Maybe that had an impact. They sat on the news as the election went into extra time… finally, the CEO said ‘Now!’ Respect.
Buoyed by that first glimmer of good news, the environmental lobby moved its guns into position. It has been going easy on aviation recently – presumably it does not want to be seen to be kicking an industry when it is down – but now, with a vaccine on the horizon, it is back to business as usual. First out of the blocks was Transport and Environment, which released a new report noting that demand for soy-based fuel was devastating the Amazon. No, not Amazon, the Amazon. Demand for soy-diesel could lead to deforestation of an area greater than London by 2030. So, not palm oil, and not soy. That the report was released just as the sustainable aviation fuel crowd was launching a new campaign to talk about how marvellous SAF is was probably coincidental. Or, near Pfizer-quality trolling.
Nonetheless, the SAF campaign rolled on, Tuesday fielding an MEP to demand a mandate for SAF as a percentage of total fuel uplift. Unfortunately, in a case of environmental credentials at 20 paces, WTM – the organisation previously known as World Travel Mart, now gone virtual – released their own study, also demanding a mandate. Except, theirs was for e-fuel, not SAF.
The news cycle is a hungry beast, needing constant feeding. Consequently, it was no surprise that our old friends at FABEC got into the act again too. They have a campaign planned and they intend spending all of the available funds. This week’s desperate plea for visibility was a press release telling us that FABEC wants you to give it the credit for ANSPs working to keep aeroplanes apart, even when those aircraft have the audacity to cross international borders – which is to say, daring to fly where their customers’ passengers want to go, even if that is rude enough to not care about how 1945-loving ANSPs have lovingly set their radars to map the border. Before FABEC, this was impossible, FABEC wants you to believe. That flights can go from Berlin to Paris is news, apparently. Well, it is if all you want is to feed the flame of publicity. We are always happy to oblige.
In even less surprising, but still more important than ANSPs-controlling-aeroplanes news, those well known bed-fellows, IATA and the European Transport Federation released a joint statement. Stand back for a moment and ask yourself, what topic could IATA and the unions have in common? Other people’s money, obviously. Yes, in also totally non-shocking news, IATA and the ETF joined forces to demand that tax payers fund aviation, sorry, provide Urgent Government Assistance to Prevent Jobs Catastrophe. Notwithstanding Covid crisis cutbacks, IATA remains well stocked with purple prose.
But, frankly, all of this was in-fighting was put into context by significantly more important news, that the Advocate General had delivered his opinion in the case X v. Kunio Travel Ltd. This case concerns tour organisers’ liability. A customer, who booked via Kunio a week long holiday at a hotel in Sri Lanka in 2010, was raped by a hotel employee. Was Kunio, as tour organiser, liable? Kunio argued that this was an unforeseeable event. In Advocate Szpunar’s opinion, the organiser of a package tour is responsible for the acts and omissions of the employees of a supplier to that organiser, foreseeable or not. Hard cases make bad law and we now risk the Package Tour Directive (90/314) going the way of 04/261 – the compensation for delay regulation.
By Wednesday more details of the vaccine breakthrough were being digested. Most significant was the news that the vaccine needs to be transported at -800: a challenge at any time. The cargo industry is coming out of the crisis well, and the nascent drone industry too is looking at how it can play a major role in the last mile, when speed is so clearly of the essence. That will put more pressure on creating the infrastructure unmanned vehicles will use. In Europe, this is called U-Space. The SESAR JU is responsible for scoping and developing the technology necessary. Its state-of-play report was therefore even more timely than expected. The bottom line: progress made; work to do.
On Thursday the week’s biggest story broke. Epidemiology and aviation crossed over. The European Investment Bank announced its Climate Bank Roadmap 2021-25. The European Investment Bank – the very institutional personification of State Aid – announced that it would align its investment strategy with the Paris Accord by the end of 2020, which means that it will no longer provide funds for the development of new runways. Instead, funds will be directed to the COVAX initiative for fair and equitable access to Covid-19 vaccines.
The world’s airports were meeting virtually at the time, at the ACI Global AGM – originally to be held in Buenos Aires – and the usual resolutions rained down. Relevantly, the airports published a resolution supporting airport health and hygiene measures. ACI then noted that climate change must be included in recovery plans. Too little, too late, for the EIB, clearly. Perhaps they will have more luck with their final resolution, that slot allocation procedures must support the recovery of air transport. Or perhaps not. The airports fought a long battle to get their role in the slot rules recognised – the word ‘airport’ now appears in the title – but it is hard to see the incumbent airlines, with their historic slot allocations protected by supine regulators, thinking that the recovery of air transport is about anything but their own recovery. The slot rules will help that handsomely.
So it seemed only appropriate that on Friday the EU agreed that next year be decreed ‘the Year of Rail’. There is a virulent train strain virus affecting European thinking and as expert epidemiologists, we will next need to focus on controlling it.
And, at that point, there seems little left to say for a long week; the week that was.