That Was The Summer That Was 23 July – 05 September
The Least Silly Silly Season on Record
I hope you had a great summer, or winter, depending on where you are, but frankly, that is said more in hope than expectation. Record heat/flooding/bushfires mingled with a war in Europe, vertiginous fuel prices and inflation and the extended bout of finger pointing and blame shifting that is the aviation industry. Not to mention cancelled flights, lost luggage and a surge in sales of baggage tracing devices. Subscribers to the Aviation Intelligence Reporter know that in a year of broken records for heat, flooding and so on, we must surely have also broken the record for the worst silly season on record.
Most of all, it is to be hoped, we now know that whilst the pilots and the controllers have the industrial muscle, and the bloodymindness to use it, we depend as much on baggage handlers as we do the baggage handlers’ more celebrated colleagues. So celebrated are they that we are again gearing up, apparently, to help some very well paid and venerated parts of the industry celebrate their self-appointed International Day of… [insert undeserving profession here]. We have the International Day of Pilots for example and the International Day of Air Traffic Controllers – note too that ICAO and all the others join these bandwagons and tweet their support, issue press releases and generally jump onboard these meaningless things – but all this does is tell the world that we have apparently learnt nothing from this summer.
If we want to right the industry, instead of finger pointing and blaming others, we should be helping to get the celebrations were we actually need them. IATA, CANSO, ACI, all the others, should be demanding, demanding, that ICAO spend time at its upcoming Assembly actually doing something about this. We need an International Day of the Blokes that Drive the Honey Wagon; an International Day of the Aircraft Cleaning Crew; and, yes, an International Day of Baggage Handlers.
In the meantime, allow me to point out what I did over the holidays. As a postscript to the blog entry of late April last year where I talked about books of fiction about aviation, I can now completely recommend Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead. It is about aviation in the same that Noah’s Ark is about animal husbandry, but it is a wonderful novel. My library shelves for Zoom calls will henceforth have seven novels on it.