European Airline Rant – More Smoking Mirrors!

Whilst I may just about commend that the UK government should have gone ahead with a meeting of its so-called COBRA emergencies committee this morning there is in fact very little that they can do other than maybe agree to charter a few ships to bring some of the estimated one million Britain’s currently stranded abroad back home. In terms of getting planes back into the skies over Europe and the Atlantic it doesn’t matter one jot what one or maybe two individual governments or airlines may wish to believe about how the almost total closedown of Europe’s skies has and is being handled the point is that until the majority of nations and specialist safety authorities determine that it really is as safe as possible to fly I am in no doubt that the airports should remain closed. Patience is thus a virtue and we must accept that for once we have been beaten by a natural event and that there is absolutely nothing that we can do other than contingency planning to get people back home and to learn that neither we nor anyone else in the world are infallible! That of course doesn’t help the many airlines and zillions of others involved whose incomes have and continue to be seriously disturbed by the disruption. They are left to count the cost for now but I do believe that given the crucial importance of airlines to all national economies these days soon governments will have to help.

However, the vast majority of airlines will in my view survive this crisis and I am in little doubt that if we take a sensible approach most of the rest of us will too. Media is in its element of course but given that this is a natural if somewhat unusual event we should avert the need to take panic measures other than speed up the process of attempting to bring people back home. Talk is cheap and while it is true that one or two European airlines are in trouble I doubt that they are about to sink yet. Meanwhile trains, ships and ferries are pretty busy and the Channel Tunnel has probably never in fact been busier. I understand also that the Queen Mary 2 which is due to sail to New York Thursday will be leaving behind no less than 1,000 would-be passengers that are currently on the Cunard waiting list!

When will it all end? Sticking my neck out the probability is that given another week or so we could well be almost back to normal save for the counting of the cost both in financial, social and business terms. Bad that the current air travel crisis is though unless the situation worsens and significantly deepens meaning it might protract beyond a month it will not in my view bring down any specific airline that operates more than a couple of planes. Of course the profits of all individual airlines that we need to remember are ultimately responsible if they have sold a ticket to getting the passenger to his or her destination will be devastated because of this event. So too will airports and indeed, all those that work or rely on the business that surrounds air travel. There is no doubt either that as each day goes the ongoing situation will impact more on the wider business community and economy and that within days now it will begin to impact on the Q2 GDP growth figures of most European and indeed, even Asian and New World economies. For some that virtually depend on the European economy for income such as Kenya for example it already has and with a devastating affect too.

For the rest of us – those that may or may not have been seriously affected ending up still being in the wrong place, that have maybe been forced to change plans or whose businesses have been hit by the inability to get goods or people in or out we and they have no choice but to grin and bare it. But although I doubt that a situation that lasts ten days to two weeks will not bring down any established airline there will be some lasting affects. These could include a reasonable expectation that airline ticket charges could well rise in the aftermath and that both personal and airline insurance will likely cost more too. Conversely demand for oil will have dropped and the is certainly cleaner too – not just missing all those burnt carbon emissions but also all that fuel that gets dumped in the air as planes come down to land! Nevertheless this is no laughing matter and I am not wishing to downplay the seriousness of the event. Airlines are still weak and this will have made them a lot weaker. What now a third strike by BA cabin staff ……I think not even if the trauma has done nothing to soften the attitude of striking French train staff.

The bottom line is that the unfortunate incident involving the Icelandic Eyjafjallajokull Volcano neither is nor can be the fault of anyone. Despite all the jokes about Iceland sending ash instead of cash there is no room for politics here save that for once we should back the EU and other air traffic authorities involved here that the decision they make is unquestionable. Leaving aside national economic and the many individual human and personal issues involved here this is as much a test of human nature as it is of human endurance. There is in my view very little more that can be done until nature decides to stop venting her sunder. That this event has devastated our ability to fly matters far less to me at this point than that for once we have either unilaterally or by working together with our European colleagues and weather forecasting organisations followed advise that was first put in place by the previous British Airways 747 event over Indonesia in 1982 when the plane lost all engines as it passed over an erupting Volcano. You either see the risks or you don’t – Air France doesn’t but I do. However, I do see that a case is building up where European airlines can go to governments to request help and compensation.

British and the many European partner air traffic organisations involved have by closing down the system completely correctly in my view been seen to put the safety of passengers and other individuals involved as the real priority.

That the event has caused devastation to the individual plans of millions is of course little more than stating the obvious but how we react to the ongoing crisis will be very interesting for observers of human nature to watch! Yesterday we saw the first signs of impatience as several airlines took to the air with seemingly empty planes to test the air. Whilst the initial results of the various test flight affirm that as all flights got back safely (as the were bound to do or they wouldn’t have been risked in the first place) it may well be impossible to show what lasting damage could be done to the planes if normal schedules are resumed too early. I refer to the potential that damage could cause the long time viability of the planes to be damaged and that such damage could ultimately increase the amount of fuel burned in the remaining through life period of the plane. I am no expert on this although I have seen the result of engine damage through particle ingestion other than bird strikes in the US.

The unprecedented that we are currently attempting to handle has with the one brief exception (during the aftermath of nine-eleven) exposed a great weakness that amazingly none of us had really thought of before. Another lesson learned then. In the post war history of the aviation industry we have never seen the like of a situation before that has led to all but complete closure of European airspace. Despite the cost and despite the personal damage this has done we should be thankful of the action that Britain’s NATS (National Air Traffic Services) and other individual air traffic control systems and governments across Europe have seen fit to take. That this system closure has come at a huge cost – maybe as much as $250m to $270m per day to the European air traffic system as a whole and maybe £20m to £25m a day to the likes of a specific airline such as British Airways a lot more of course to each and every economy affected is and should be a massive concern to all of us. We are dependent on the airline industry – some would say too dependent. My final thought on this is that the closure of Dulles airport in Washington DC for days and other US airports for maybe less during the post nine-eleven disaster had a far worse negative affect on the economy than anyone had previously thought! Let us hope that it isn’t even worse here.