A cornucopia of news, opinion, views, facts and quirky bits that need to be talked about. Join our community and join in the conversation on all matters aviation. The blog includes our weekly round-up of the bits of European aviation you may otherwise have missed – That Was The Week That Was
We all deserve a summer break. TWTWTW is no exception. But aviation never stops. Indeed the northern summer is its busiest period. How long that remains the case is not to diss the fliers of the northern hemisphere – seemingly committed to breaking records for flights and passengers numbers – but to note how fast other regions grow. On current evidence: pretty fast. Still, those plucky Europeans are doing their best, with the busiest day ever for flights happening in July this year. Eurocontrol has covered this in its ‘Challenges of Growth’ report. Recommended reading.
A holiday is a great chance to catch up with all those industry magazines that arrive during the working week, working month and working quarter. Good intentions to read each and every one of them in detail can be swamped by the ceaseless grind of the day-to-day. So TWTWTW took its holiday to look at what the most recent crop of magazines produced. A fascinating read.
What is compelling the attention of the editors of these industry journals – that sounds so much nicer than industry rags, doesn’t it? – can be reduced to one word: Brexit. Brexit dominates magazines from Air Traffic Management to Jane’s Airport Review by way of Airport International and the Royal Aeronautical Society’s Aerospace. First into the ‘wish I had said that’ file were the very clever words of Aerospace’s Howard Wheldon, who noted ‘the devilish detail’ of Brexit. That devilish detail is inspected in detail in this quarter’s round of magazines. Generally, the view is that nobody knows, but that questions outnumber answers.
The most important question is the UK’s relationship with EASA. Patrick Ky, the head of EASA, talking in Aerospace, quickly turns the entire discussion into one about performance based regulation and the need for better, smarter, better resourced, regulators. The sub-text – not always all that deeply buried – is that Europe is better as one, not 28, or 27, or whatever number your particular definition of Europe generates. The UK CAA agrees. The hard-core Brexiteers may not.
This is the issue of sovereignty. Brexit is built around it. But for aviation, it is a busted flush. The Air Traffic Management magazine, which was once called Air Traffic Magazine, a clever play on words, or letters anyway, obviously lost on its readers, has a new tag to go along with its new, much less subtle name. It is now the magazine that covers ‘strategy, technology and management for the world’s most global industry’. That would be the global industry that cannot deliver a single European sky then? Global industry? This is beyond parody. It is arguably the world’s most national industry, where every nation does it. But so is education, and sanitation, and health care… The list goes on. And frankly, each of them is more important.
To prove the point, the editorial, from the normally sound Aimee Turner, calls out the national divisions stopping the creation of a single European upper airspace FIR. That would be the global industry at work.
One more thing is keeping the magazines aflame: remote towers. They are reaching something resembling their obvious potential to digitise what was the last analogue piece of ATM. Obvious to everyone but SESAR, apparently. SESAR’s head, Florian Guillermet, on a PR blitz, pops up in almost all the magazines. Sadly, for SESAR, the benefits of remote towers were ‘unanticipated’. Really? The question is when do all the various straws in the wind about UTM and digitisation land for Europe’s ATM technology supremos? For that we may need next quarter’s editions.
