Europe's air travel industry is threatened with being smothered to death quietly. Making the consumer its champion is the best way to resist
Transport is a perennial headache for western European governments. Business needs it, people want it. But whatever the transport mode, it is noisy and polluting and, when congestion occurs, frustrating, expensive and inefficient.
When warring armies want to stop a country working they target its transport infrastructure - road and rail bridges, seaports, airports. In a continent which is signed up to the Kyoto environmental protocol, but is also dedicated to material prosperity and freedom of choice and movement for its people, the tensions between the ever-increasing demand for the means to move goods and enable people to travel and the task of saving the planet are not going to lessen.
Road transport has not seen a revolution since the autobahn, first built in the 1930s, but which has since become a self-perpetuating phenomenon, forever extending its network. It is arguable whether the high-speed train is a revolution, but it is certainly better than what went before and massive state money is being poured into extending its network in mainland Europe. Air transport is not so lucky. By 2025, projections indicate, air travel demand will not be able to be met - an equivalent of 3.5 million flights a year for which demand exists will not get airborne. And the choke point is airports.
Air transport's last revolution was the jet-powered transport aircraft that brought air travel, if not quite to the masses, to a very wide market. Europe's "happening" revolution is the low-fare scheduled airline. It is genuinely bringing air travel to the masses, and is transforming the travel habits even of those who used airlines before. The European Low Fares Airline Association (ELFAA) reveals that 59% of its business is new demand created by its low prices. Perhaps more staggering - and this is exactly what transport ministers in today's world did not want to hear - 71% of the individuals on the average low-fare scheduled flight would not be making a journey at all if this mode of transport were not available at this price. ELFAA's members are paragons of successful enterprise, providing consumer choice, easy mobility and incredible value, which are all gods that politicians normally worship. But the ministers are facing a serious dilemma here: is this a child that should be strangled at birth, or is it to be nurtured? Because the ELFAA carriers are not only a phenomenon in their own right, their success is forcing the full-service airlines to provide better value also.
But the low-fare carriers cannot be strangled at birth because they have become a part of people's lives already. They could, however, along with the airline industry as a whole, be smothered by a combination of aviation-specific consumer compensation laws, competition rules making publicly owned secondary airports more expensive, fuel taxes and pollution levies, all of which, added to security costs, push up their costs and erode the price differentials between the no-frills and the full-service carriers.
But there is another way too. Aviation could be smothered to death by placing a governmental dead hand on airport infrastructure improvement and expansion. The whole industry knows it and fears it. The European air transport industry met, perhaps not coincidentally, in the European Parliament buildings in Brussels last week. Eurocontrol was the co-ordinator, but the participants were the Airports Council International (Europe), the International Air Transport Association and the Air Transport Action Group. Improving airport operations - in every respect from safety to efficiency - was the theme, but the inevitability of airport congestion dominated the scene-setting presentations. All industry sectors were there because the theme - "Partnership for change" - was more than anything else about integrating airports seamlessly into the air traffic management (ATM) system. Gate-to-gate ATM is the buzzword. Just as road transport's great revolution - motorways - shows its weak point where the massive stream of traffic hits urban boundaries, so airport and en-route air traffic management are not actually integrated, and traffic flow suffers as a result. Rail is the only centre-to-centre system. This is also, arguably, rail's only real strength.
The air transport industry has to lobby politicians and spell out to businesses and leisure travellers what is at stake if air transport is prevented from meeting demand. It has to win hearts and minds by doing everything it can to be a good neighbour. It has to use existing resources far, far better. It has to be impeccably safe, supremely efficient, and make travelling a pleasant experience. That is all.
Source: Flight International