Mark Pilling: December 2006 Archives

What is it about seaplane services that are so attractive at the moment? The latest one to get going is Destination Air Shuttle, billed as Thailand's only seaplane shuttle service.

News of its appearance comes just weeks after some bright sparks conducted tests in London with a Twin Otter fitted with floats. The aircraft landed successfully on one of London's docks. The idea under study by a Greek seaplane operator is to link London to other UK cities using lakes, rivers and harbours.
Elsewhere, further to the north in Scotland, Loch Lomond Seaplanes has been given approval to link Glasgow to the Highlands & Islands to the north. Such journeys take hours by road.
Thailand's seaplane service launches in February from Phuket International Airport. It will offer 12 flights per day with its Cessna Caravans serving the island resorts of Phi Phi Island, Krabi and Koh Lanta. It says a half day overland journey will be reduced to no more than 30 minutes.
Captain Nithit Kesangam, chief executive of Destination Air Shuttle says: "This is an outstanding service to hotels and tour operators in the Phuket area. This is a fantastic shot in the arm for hotels and tourists going to Phi Phi, Krabi, and Koh Lanta."
SriLankan Airlines is another with a seaplane service. Its Cessna Caravans take leisure travellers around the island on a taxi service taking them quickly from Colombo airport to their hotels.
Check out Sydney Seaplanes in Australia as well - the seaplane tour feature whets the appetite for an intimate picnic getaway on a secluded beach. Commercially challenging as such ventures sound, I must admit to being tempted to try one as a consumer. Who says the romance of flying is dead?

Today, Wednesday 20th December, after much leaking, the European Commission (EC) has released its proposals to bring airlines into its Emissions Trading Scheme. It has received a cautious welcome across the airline and airport sector, with IATA, the Association of European Airlines, ACI Europe and easyJet all commenting swiftly on the proposal.

As advocated by Airline Business, the scheme will not apply from the outset to non-European Union carriers. In fact not until 2012. This is a year after the scheme applies to carriers flying inside the EU. After that those flying to and from the continental will have to trade their carbon. This is a pragmatic move, but may still not be enough time for some states, such as the US, to stomach.

The EC's move is an important step in a scheme that surely is the only sustainable way for airlines to play their part in addressing climate change - ie paying for their polluting effect - and still offering the ability to grow.

Qantas boss Geoff Dixon is not one to mince his words, or to avoid getting stuck into a fight, so it is no surprise to see him vigorously defending the takeover of his carrier by a privately backed group. Here is an example of the reporting on the Qantas deal from The Australian newspaper.

As an exercise in putting the record straight, from his point of view, Dixon's lengthy tirade is a worthy read.

BMED chief executive David Richardson was in Washington recently to promote his new services from London to West Africa to the US travel trade.
Bookings on BMED's on new services to Dakar, Senegal, and Freetown, Sierra Leone, from London Heathrow Airport are better than expected, according to chief executive David Richardson. Launched at the end of October, the bookings for December and January are "way over budget", he says.

Richardson was in Washington for a reception at the British Embassy, sponsored by UK Trade & Investment and British Airways, to celebrate the new service; there are an 40,000-60,000 residents in the Washington area with West African roots.

A franchise partner of British Airways since 1997, BMED operates the new services three times a week with narrow-body Airbus aircraft, equipped with Club World and World Traveller seating. The flights are timed for connections to and from BA's 40 daily US-UK transatlantic flights.

BMED currently has three A320s and five A321s in its fleet and has five more A321s on order. "We're looking forward to further expansion in the next few years." With the new service, the carrier flies to 17 destinations in Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa, including many points other carriers avoid, such as in Kazakhstan, Syria, Iran and Lebanon, where it started flying in 1994 as British Mediterranean Airways. "We're used to serving challenging destinations," Richardson notes.

The airline makes a point of hiring local managers at each airport. They are both a fantastic source of information on local culture and markets, he says, and the airline has been able to help with inward investment, playing a role in the development of the local economies it serves. "We have no expat managers at all," Richardson adds. "It gives us a bit of an edge."

Iain Burns, the British Airways public relations chief who resigned in early October in the wake of the still on-going UK/US probe into price-fixing, has swapped chilly Waterside for sunny Abu Dhabi. Burns, a highly experience PR operator, has been named as the head of corporate communications at Etihad Airways, the fast growing Middle East carrier that is vying to give Emirates a run for its money.

It is a remarkable and swift renaissance for Burns and he will be looking to put the price-fixing issue behind him very quickly. Etihad will be getting a seasoned airline PR operator. Etihad's new chief executive, James Hogan, says that the experience Burns has in the aviation sector "is ideally suited in telling the story of our expansive agenda to the media and our own employees".

Burns, 48, left BA after five years as its head of corporate communications. He had joined from PR consultancy Bell Pottinger where, in a neat twist, he handled European and North American PR for Emriates. Burns had two spells at BA, and managed the PR for American Airlines in the UK. In his first public words since leaving BA, Burns said: "This is an exciting time to join Etihad which has come a long way in a short period of time and has great plans for the future. I am very much looking forward to playing my part in articulating the airline's formidable strategy to a growing audience around the globe."

Burns is expected to begin work at Etihad in 2007.

Expect appointment news from the other BA official who resigned in after the price-fixing probe - commercial director Martin George - shortly as well. Word on the street is that, not surprisingly for this well-regarding executive, offers have been coming his way.

"As the director general of IATA I am a bit like a catholic priest - I can't disclose what I know," says Giovanni Bisignani, responding to a press question at the association's annual press briefing over what he thinks will happen to his former employer Alitalia.
Bisignani, who ran the ailing flag carrier when it wasn't ailing in the 1990s, says he has talked to several of the airline chief executives mentioned in the media as potential suitors for Alitalia in the past few weeks. "I do not see any developing an interest in the deal," he reveals.
Alitalia and Olympic remain the two difficult and outstanding cases in Europe when it comes to profound restructuring. And it should be hands-off as far as their respective governments are concerned when it comes to sorting these carriers out, he says. The Swiss government's attitude of it's now time to sink-or-swim towards the resurrection of the country's flag carrier after its collapse is the stance to take, he says.

Flying out of London Heathrow Terminal 4 yesterday, my first visit to this outlying home for British Airways and assorted others, brought it home how much the carriers that are left in this terminal and terminals 1,2 and 3 will be at a disadvantage when BA moves to the glittering new Terminal 5.
Terminal 4 is horrible. The interior is dark and grim, the check-in zone is narrow and cramped, the boarding and shopping areas are dense and crowded.
Now I'm unlikely to be telling anyone who uses Terminal 4 anything new here. But Air France-KLM and fellow SkyTeam carriers I pity you greatly if you do indeed take up residence in this terminal.
I resolve to ask a lot more questions in 2007 about how BAA proposes to invest in Terminal 4 to bring it up to something at least approaching Terminal 5 standards. I am sure SkyTeam and Air France-KLM have been asking them for ages - I wonder what answer they are getting?
One quesiton I know they will be unlikely to find a positive answer to is whether or not they will obtain lower terminal fees at Terminal 4 compared to BA's at Terminal 5? Terminal 4 will be so sub-standard compared to Terminal 5 it will be almost immoral not to charge less. Or BA should be charged more for the pleasure of using Terminal 5?
BA, on the other hand, is delighted it will be vacating Terminal 4. In fact, the countdown is well under 500 days to go to the big move to Terminal 5. As BA says in its inflight magazine: "The move will transform the flying experience for the 30 million BA passengers who pass through Heathrow airport each year."
I hope to be among them, as I aim never to set foot in Terminal 4 again (well except that is upon my return there this evening!)

The world's airline association IATA has carried out its threat to take the Argentinian government to court over the charging structure proposed for the country's airport operator AA2000. This dispute particularly involves the country's main gateway Buenos Aires airport and is being supported by ALTA, the Latin American Airline Association.
The move is the third time IATA has taken legal action against what it says are flawed airport deals: in June it took the French government to court over its fee hikes at the Paris airports, and in May it filed a case against the Dutch government's charging increases at Amsterdam Schiphol airport.
The issue in Argentina dates back to 1998 when the government privatized the country's airports creating AA2000. The complaints against AA2000 and the government already fill several pages of IATA documents, but include price discrimination between foreign and domestic carriers and against the structure of a renegotiated contract between the two players.It really does make for some gruesome reading. Speaking at a global IATA press briefing today (12 December), the association's director general Giovanni Bisignani said: "There is a cosy relationship between the airport and government. That is going to turn a failed privatization into a disaster."
The Argentinian case is a political hot potato, partly because the government plans to take an equity stake in AA2000. In fact the issue is so sensitive in Argentina that IATA has had to previously unheard of lengths. When Bisignani went to testify at a hearing in Buenos Aires about the airport contract he had to have body guards, and the association has had to have special phone lines installed as it suspected it was being bugged.

For a coherent and closely argued speech on aviation's environmental responsibilities look no further than Martin Broughton's submission to the UK's Aviation Club on Wednesday 6 December.

The erudite British Airways chairman said: "I have no doubt whatever that the right policy response is to go with the grain of what society wants: an aviation sector that is environmentally responsible and focused on making real reductions in global carbon emissions. Carbon-safe flying, you might say."

In his view, this means emissions trading and not so-called green taxes. In fact, moments before he delivered his speech Broughton was told by his press office colleagues that the UK Chancellor Gordon Brown had doubled Air Passenger Duty.

Broughton was scathing in his response to this "extremely blunt instrument".

"It is a revenue raising measure, pure and simple," he said. Aviation is being treated as a "cash cow", he added.

On emissions trading, the European Commission's plan to include all flights in and out of the European Union as well as all those within the EU is "overly ambitious and self-defeating", said Broughton. "It will undoubtedly lead to international disputes, as non-EU states and airlines challenge the right of the EU to apply the scheme to them."

Being popular is great. But popularity brings its own problems - chief amongst them for airports is queues. And Cancun this weekend showed why it is a victim of its own success.

A flood of humanity was departing the soft sands and bright lights of this Mexican playground for visitors from North America, and Cancun Airport struggled to cope. The lines for that most active of Mexican immigrants, Continental Airlines, were the longest and most tragic. Average check-in time was at least an hour.

No wonder Cancun's privately owned operator ASUR is seeking permission from the country's Government to construct and operate a new airport on Mexico's Mayan Riviera. Judging by Saturday's crush, and admittedly this could have been the busiest part of Cancun's week, it could not come too soon.

There are plenty of carriers queuing up to join the queues at Cancun. One of the latest is JetBlue Airways. It launched daily Airbus A320 flights on 30 November between Cancun and its New York JF Kennedy Airport base. Read JetBlue chief executive David Neeleman's blog about the launch via this link. He is seen here doing the big foam scissors thing after touching down on the first flight last week.

In fact its flights will be popular, not only because it is a cool carrier but because switched on travellers will use the less frequent visitors to Cancun, like JetBlue, Spirit and United, simply because the check-in queues could be shorter. Continental suffers because of the sheer scale of its operation in Cancun.

Cancun and ASUR are between a rock and a hard place. Its aggressive route development programme is designed to pack the airport with aircraft and passengers.

ASUR needs strong revenues to invest in its proposed new airport. But these are suffering because of terminal congestion - the long queues give travellers less time and less inclination to spend. And we all understand how important non-aeronautical revenues are to airports.