TWTWTW: 31 August-4 September. Back to work, back to business, back to business as usual…
Ah, the rentré, that time when the kids go back to school, offices open and we all come back to work. Funny old year, 2020. Let us all hope that there is not another one like it. Still, we Zoomed back to work, we tried very hard to focus and we got down to work.
Monday saw all of us, pencils sharpened, hair cut and lunch packed, reporting in. And to get us into the right mood, ACI Global got straight down to business, releasing an advisory bulletin noting that we face vanishing traffic, collapsing revenue and rising risk. Welcome back. To make matters worse for the airports, the New York Times reported that we are getting ever closer to flying cars. A Japanese company, ominously named SkyDrive, announced a successful four minute flight of its eVTOL. That, by the way, makes it three and a half minutes longer than the Wright boys’ first flight, and look at the fuss that created. The first Wright Brothers’ flight could have taken place inside a now not-in-our-skies Boeing B747 Jumbo jet, so baby steps as they may be for a one-seater, eight-engine device, we are well advised to think through the issues. That is what CIVATAglobal is doing. Yes, Aviation Advocacy is involved, but do not let that stop you from having a look and seeing if you can be involved too.
After a start like that, Tuesday was always going to need a big kick-start to get our attention, so the breaking news from Politico that UK Secretary for Transport, Grant Schapps, a private pilot, had an aircraft registered on the US registry was a good start. Ask any seasoned aviation person and they will tell you that having a PPL as the minister for aviation is a disaster. For some reason, perhaps to do with them being on the intersection of pilot and politician, they think they know Everything About Aviation. Having a strident Brexiteer taking back control by registering his aircraft in the US was pure comedy gold. As we said, there might be good reason, to do with the financing and insuring requirements of his bank, or the flexibility of the licensing, but it did throw the attention back to Brexit and the prospects of an EU-UK deal. Not all that rosy, now that you ask. We thought that we had all moved past that but maybe now is the time to think again about how third and fourth freedoms might be leveraged.
Still, we were reminded on Wednesday that much is at stake with the pandemic. That includes the world’s postal service. The US postal service has been under attack from the US President, but he warmed up by attacking the global system last year. His complaint then was that the rates for ‘last mile’ delivery were skewed (at the behest of the US, when it was the world’s leading exporting-by-post nation) such that delivery of items ordered over the internet (the US now the world’s leading importing-by-post nation) were favouring manufacturing nations, or more accurately, one manufacturing nation in particular – China. The Universal Postal Union – the world’s second oldest international agency – nearly fell apart. They fear now that the pandemic could do what the US president could not and destroy the world’s airmail system. So, in a bout of inter-agency cooperation, ICAO and the UPU issued a joint statement imploring that we do not let the pandemic kill airmail and express cargo sector (note that does not include the err… express cargo operators, like DHL, FedEx and UPS). Knowing the speed with which both of these august organisations work, particularly in August, it can be presumed that this joint statement was actually referring to the 1920 pandemic.
As sure as night follows day, you can bank on something in this pandemic, or indeed any pandemic, or for that matter, any other time: slots matter. And so it proved on Thursday. Any thought that the summer would linger or that we are not now back in the saddle could be well and truly dismissed. As regular as clockwork, in came the press release pressing DG MOVE to continue to waive the slot rules. The big change was that the slot coordinators and ACI Europe came along for the ride too. They did so on the express condition that this time, the airlines agree to play by the rules and actually do as the slot rules require. This includes returning slots in a timely manner to ensure that other airlines, or maybe ad-hoc cargo flights, could use that slot. We discussed this in the Aviation Intelligence Reporter in August so it was good to see the point being accepted.
Nothing has put the panic into pandemic more than border closures and border closure rumours. The aviation industry cannot get started again until passengers can move about, or at least know when they cannot or where they cannot move to and from. Within an ever closer Europe, you might think that was not too hard, but you would be wrong. That is why, rightly, the Commission’s most recent attempt to overcome this, the EC’s Coordination Framework was roundly welcomed at least by the airports. As it should be. Clarity and thoughtfulness are two good starts in these troubled times. Now all it needs is to be applied by the member states.