TWTWTW 18 May – 22 May
A week of new friendships, (too) close friendships and trying to be friends.
On Monday, Michael O’Leary treated us to an enlightening start to the week. In his classic style of verbal ‘richness’ and blatant truths mixed with a bit of spin, the Ryanair Group chief executive slammed the UK’s 14-day quarantine plan and questioned the rationale of the Italian government inc giving – again – state aid to Alitalia. This time the country’s perennially loss-making flag carrier is set to receive €3 billion. To put that in some context, O’Leary remarked, the Italian government is awarding €1 billion of aid to the Italian education system. A larger concern must be the distortion of the European airline industry following the massive bailouts by governments of their flag carriers, all of which got the blessing of the European Commission without too much (read: without any) scrutiny. “We almost feel sorry them facing pressure from capitals, Berlin, Paris, Rome and so on to bend existing rules and allow significant amounts of state aid to flag carrier airlines,” Ryanair’s Group Chief Legal & Regulatory Officer Juliusz Komorek revealed. “So we will be assisting the EU Commission with appeals of those decisions to European court and hoping that the court will accept our requests to deal with these matters in an expedited manner.” COVID-19 has turned the world upside down, but who would have thought that it would turn Ryanair into a pal of the Commission and friend and cheerleader of the ECJ?
But, the code at the moment is safety first, so what better to reassure passengers it is safe to fly in the COVID-19 era than strip Qatar’s cabin crew of their attractive Bordeaux coloured outfits and put them in hazmat suits, sterile-white full body protective gear, safety goggles, gloves, and a mask?
Airlines like to copy one other but not necessarily learn from each other. So on Tuesday, less than two years after British Airways experienced a major data breach and hackers harvested details of about 500,000 customers, easyJet admitted to a similar though slightly-larger scale incident. Hackers gained access to email addresses and travel details of about 9 million clients through a “highly sophisticated cyber-attack” and 2,208 customers also had their credit card details stolen. If the London-based budget carrier is to suffer the same fate as its London-based full-service counterpart, its prospects do not look prosperous. The Information Commissioner’s Office, the U.K.’s data protection agency, slapped a record £183 million fine on BA for infringements of the General Data Protection Regulation. That is excluding compensation pay-outs to customers resulting from class-action suits.
It was on the cards and it happened fast, as (too) close friends would expect it to go. Speaking of close friends, in late April IATA sent its position paper to ICAO lobbying for a rewrite of CORSIA’s baseline, and now the European Commission is endorsing it. Brussels tabled a proposal for adoption by EU member states to adjust the baseline to take into account the impact of the pandemic on air travel and CO2 levels. Out is the initial baseline, the average level of emissions from international flights from 2019 and 2020, from which annual growth and future offsetting requirements will be calculated to achieve carbon neutral growth from 2020. In is the new baseline: only 2019 emissions. “The pandemic would lead to a substantially lower CORSIA baseline… which would entail higher offsetting requirements,” the European Commission noted. Hold on for a minute. Would higher offsetting requirements not support the objectives of the European Green Deal and help the global aviation industry keep its collective licence to grow by bringing emissions down quickly and permanently, as repeatedly propagated by the same European Commission? Yes. But that is not what (too) close friends are for.
Wednesday saw IATA and ACI becoming pals, not best pals but better pals than in April when the airline trade body displayed a patronising stance vis-à-vis airports in requesting individual airports to detail the extent of their cost cutting measures so that it may offer ‘advice’ on how they should run their business. To add insult to injury, IATA’s strategy document “Potential financial and operational measures to mitigate COVD-19 impact related to Airports and ANSPs” detailed a full range of measures on how airports should support airlines. Proposed measure included the postponement of aeronautical charges payments without surcharges or penalties, removal of automatic inflationary increases, waiver of parking fees, a review and scrutinization of investments and so on. Some tensions were ironed out behind the scenes—IATA dropped references to ‘airports should waive collection of charges’ and other similar demands—prompting a partial public truce and a joint publication of a “Roadmap for Aviation Industry Restart”.
Some hours later, the eagerly awaited joint EASA and European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control guidelines for a safe restart of air transport were released. It did not hold any unanticipated recommendations and fell short of advising national authorities or airlines to leave the middle seat empty. The guidelines urge “where allowed by the passenger load, cabin configuration and mass and balance requirements, aeroplane operators should ensure, to the extent possible, physical distancing among passengers.” The protocol however warns that, if situations were not properly managed, there would be an increased risk of conflict that “may be due to passengers not wishing to sit next to each other or accusing each other of not following the rules.”
On Thursday, a public holiday for much of Europe, a Barclays research note fittingly concluded that low-cost carriers are more likely to experience a stronger recovery in travel than the network carriers. A survey of 2,075 UK consumers on their expected leisure and business travel behaviour after the pandemic showed that leisure travel is likely to return first, whilst business travel will ramp up only slowly. Post COVID-19, 40% of business travellers say they will reduce the number of flights they take, while only 26% of leisure travellers are likely to do the same. Driving this is the fact that a majority believe that future business trips will be replaced by other means, and the results indicate that between 12-17% of business trips are at risk of being substituted by video and audio calls.
Friday saw German MEP Pieter Liese gave his take on the EASA/ ECDC guidelines. According to the EPP spokesperson for health, it is “completely disproportionate that we allow restaurant owners; fitness studio operators and others to work only under strict conditions and with the necessary distance, but that the airlines still have the option of operating the aircraft down to the last seat.” Moreover, he said, it is “not acceptable that airlines, because they have a better lobby, should be favoured over other important sectors of the economy and society.” Formerly a member of the Transport and Climate committees of the European Parliament, Mr Liese is no friend of the airlines.