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The world aviation industry AGM show, a three week, three venue extravaganza, finally rolled into Brussels this week, on the last leg of a tour that had been from Sydney for the IATA AGM, via Bangkok, for the CANSO event to the ACI World (and indeed ACI-Europe) meeting. It is a testing three weeks. Once, the DGs of the three organisations mutually pledged to each attend all of the AGMs, but somehow, they had other things to do on the day. Few and far between are those that attend all three.
So on Monday evening, when the ACI event kicked off with a reception at Brussels’ Musée des Beaux Arts, some were thinking of Icarus. There is a masterpiece by Bruegel of him plunging into the sea the museum. Well may one ask what the aviation industry’s fascination with Icarus is? IATA has a conference room named after him. So does SITA. Airbus had a subsidiary company called Icarus. Relevantly, the interesting news on Monday was that in Norway, Avinor, the State-owned airport and ANSP operator demonstrated electric-powered flight. Short-haul only at this stage, they concede. Icarus would surely approve.
Tuesday was highjacked by Eamonn Brennan of Eurocontrol. He was speaking at the ACI AGM and dropped onto the table its new report about the ‘challenges’ to growth for Europe. It does not make pleasant reading. Not enough airports, not enough new ways of thinking about ATM. Growth is predicted to rise relentlessly. There is nothing about the way we do things now that give us hope for the future. Traffic has increased by 3.4% but en-route delays have risen from 0.46 minutes per flight to 1.05 minutes per flight. Of course nobody has a 1 minute delay. That is the average. It actually means that some people have three hour delays. As we mentioned last week, the estimated amount of delay for 2018 has already been exceeded. Sure, as the A4E will tell you, 28% of this delay is down to ‘disruptive events’ which means strikes and 27% to weather. However, 55% is caused by staffing/capacity issues, notably in Germany, France and the Low Countries. According to Eurocontrol, by 2040, 1.5 million flights – 160 million passengers – will be unable to fly. Europe’s traditional solution to this crunch has been to hope for a crisis and thus an economic downturn. Failing to plan means planning to fail etc…
After that bombshell, the ACI announcement on airport ownership, and privatisation in particular was put in the background. The study was a repost to the IATA work, announced at their AGM, on alternative ways to fund the necessary infrastructure Brennan was talking about (hint, not by the privatised airlines).
The A4E chimed in on Wednesday with its standard issue blast about ATM strikes and the numbers of passengers disrupted. A summer of discontent looms. CANSO stood by remarkably mute during all of these dire predictions.
The ACI privatisation study may have been upstaged on the day, but it did set off the predictable barrage of responses, including, by Thursday another shot in the slot control debate. This time, IATA announced that its slot guidelines had delivered ‘unprecedented’ choice and competition. This is a fascinating use of the word ‘unprecedented’. To the extent it means that no other system of choice or competition had been tried, it is of course true, but to be polite, disingenuous in the extreme.
Friday is reserved for the pilots of Air France and KLM, who have written an open letter to the board setting out their demands for any new CEO. The post mark of this missive is clearly the central post office of Cloud Cuckoo Land…
