That Was The Week That Was 21-25 September
The Fabulous Empires Strike Back – And Aviation Centres in Cyber Space
Had Winston Churchill known of the Functional Airspace Blocks, or FABs, a Single European Sky 1 initiative that makes the reverse of nominative determinism A Thing, he might have said of them that they were modest initiatives, with much to be modest about. So when on Monday, FABEC, the largest of the FABs – involving France, Germany, the Low Countries and Switzerland (think of it as the Holy Roman Empire) – put out a lengthy justification for its existence you can be sure that Something Was Up. You have to admire the poor PR hack given the task of making FABEC look fabulous, given that the modesty of its achievements and the delays its members single-handedly generated before Covid solved the capacity issue. Still, never mind the quality feel the width, the release said, looking at the cooperation between its members and not at its members’ actual performance, individually, or collectively. That Europe does not have a Single European Sky is an insoluble mystery, apparently.
The Something That Was Up was revealed on Tuesday, when Commissioner V?lean announced a new push to make SES2+ a reality. Call it SES2++ There is a Brexit Bonus after all. Hooray! The UK leaving the EU means that Gibraltar is no longer an issue. The long-mooted unbundling of data services is to be pushed, EASA, Europe’s safety agency will become the economic regulator, the Network Manager will play a more significant and central role and FABs downplayed. Regional cooperation will be steered by the Network Manager. The package got the to-be-expected cold shoulder from the ANSPs – sorry, the ANSPs welcomed the package and will study it, and by the way have we told you how magical FABs are? There is no need for further action, they implied, because, well, FABs.
The airlines, in the meantime, were holding court elsewhere in cyberland. Their new demand is that every passenger in the world be systematically tested before departure. Given the advances in technology, IATA’s Alexandre de Juniac assured us, a test can be done for a mere $10.00. They expect to be able to administer 1,000,000 a day. By the end of the first month we could probably build a bridge across the Atlantic for that amount. Who should pay for these tests? Governments, of course. Not content to absorb state aid equivalent to the GDP of a small country, taxpayers are now being asked to pay for private individual’s travel. Of course, for the airlines it has to be a Someone Else that pays; airlines have spent a lifetime telling the world that to increase the cost of travel by one cent will see the entire industry collapse, so sensitive is travel to price.
Wednesday got off to a rollicking comedic start, with the release of a statement from the various staff associations – note the careful non-use of the word ‘union’ there – noting that it is ‘time to rethink!’ – note the careful use of the exclamation mark here – the post Covid recovery. Covid has proved that aviation is critical infrastructure it starts. Really? The world seems to have survived better than we hoped without passenger travel. The internet is now critical infrastructure; Zoom is critical infrastructure. Obviously, we all want to travel to see friends and family; we all want the economic benefits of face-to-face meetings; we all want our jobs; but… What we need more than any of that is serious, focused, forward-looking reform of the industry. Or, we can all just pretend that everything is going to be just fine. Click your heels three times… As the Florence School of Regulation noted in its thought piece, infrastructure is converging and we need to know how to deal with that too. Spoiler alert, there will be disruption, one way or another.
Having prepared the ground early in the week to remind the world that FABs actually still exist – a wake-up call that, by the fact it was made showed that it was necessary – FABCE came back to the well on Thursday to tell us about an actual initiative they had signed. Yes, the ANSPs of Switzerland and Germany had agreed to develop cross-border free routing – starting at the end of next year, mind. No rush. FABEC has been in existence since SES 1 was signed in the year 2000, after all. We do not want to get too far forward. The German ANSP, DFS has been offering tit-bits of free routing for some time, but only at flight levels that allow free routing around the dark side of the moon, so we should be grateful for the initiative, but to call the timing ‘curious’ is to be disingenuous. Perhaps it is one for the ‘protests too much’ file?
In any event, by Friday, campaigning to replace the Secretary General of ICAO had moved up a gear. Generally, in the pre-Covid world of yesteryear, this was done discretely, behind glasses of mid-priced champagne at diplomatic receptions. Social distancing puts an end to that, at least for now, so other weapons are being rolled into place. The McGill University’s Air and Space Law Institute has long been the priesthood of the Church of ICAO, charged with the holy task of keeping the eternal flame alight, the one true truth evangelised and heretics put to the sword. So what finer group to be lobbied to support a particular candidate, by means of emails, rather than reception. All the graduates of the Institute were asked to support one of their own, a keeper of the faith.
In the meantime, it was finally announced that this year, the already-delayed IATA AGM – that annual gathering of the great and the good of the aviation industry was to move on-line. Traditionally, IATA puts out a copy and replace press releases informing the world that for one week only, the centre of world aviation will be [insert city name here]. This year, it is to be in cyberville. Maybe we called Metaphor Week too soon.