A new informal global multidisciplinary coalition of airline industry forces may be quietly emerging. Air Canada’s cabin crew union, CUPE, has reportedly been seen consorting with Spain’s Air Traffic Controllers’ union, USCA, and Qantas international pilots union, AIPA, over large jugs of sangria. The Canadian and Australian unions, impressed by the Spanish controllers’ salaries, which are said to exceed Warren Buffet’s annual income, have joined forces to see if they can share lessons on how it is done.
Each of the bodies concerned is preoccupied with aviation safety and is in complete agreement that their high pay and generous conditions are essential ingredients in avoiding accidents and ensuring on-time performance.
Aside from this, the groups are currently stalled on how to integrate the initials of their different unions. It appears that they contain too many vowels to make an acceptable acronym, but after several hours of discussion during stop-work talks, the group issued a statement: “After detailed consideration, we are wholeheartedly in agreement that shorter working hours and higher pay will be necessary to ensure that we have time to evolve a programme to ensure the airline industry remains safe – even if this entails grounding it entirely.”
‘Virtual Airport’ to revolutionise the aviation industry
THE MUNICIPALITY OF BAD TAXENHEIM in rural Germany has announced plans to construct a vast virtual airport and aerotropolis designed to transform the way the airline industry works, bringing thousands of new virtual jobs to the region.
Bad Taxenheim Mayor, Frau Angie Mehrtaxes, said a team of experts from leading profit-maker Fatbank had been studying the evolution of the airline industry and concluded that a conspicuous part of the new world was focused around the expansion of the “virtual airline”.
“The concept is enormously attractive to airports, given their normally enormous and long-term capital commitments. By becoming a virtual airport, we can avoid a whole lot of unnecessary cost and at the same time offer a much lower cost base for our customers. We plan to invite several leading virtual airlines to serve the airport. Given the low risk and low impact airport footprint, we can be up and running within several months,” said Frau Mehrtaxes.
Fatbank virtual expert, SVP Saul D Mysole, who was recently responsible for overseeing BHP Billiton’s purchase of the entire listed airline industry, confirmed that the bank had been working closely with the municipality. “We are convinced that this cutting- edge concept will generate enormous revenue for Fatbank, while creating virtually no value for anyone else. It is such a clean transaction that we are surprised no-one – including us – has thought of it before.”
Design plans for the new virtual airport to be built in rural Germany
A new open skies regime will be introduced to ensure as many virtual airlines as possible are able to operate, except from the UAE. Main revenue streams for the virtual airport are expected to be from aviation taxes levied by the German government. These have already been highly influential in deterring real airline operations in Germany. Other schemes to enhance virtualisation of the industry are currently being studied closely.
EU environmental spokesman, Ed Inderclouds, was glowing in his support for the new virtual airport: “This will be exceptionally wonderful in reducing the industry’s carbon emissions and laying a much smaller footprint. I can truthfully say I have no idea what it means, but as long as the carbon footprint is reduced, we strongly support it. We will now look to find another way of taxing the operation, but we have hundreds of people working on this with increasingly lower levels of work emissions and I’m sure we will find something equally innovative very soon.”
This collection of "It could be true..." items comes from the light-hearted closing pages of CAPA's boardroom strategy journal, Airline Leader. CAPA is running a series of these items over the New Year holiday. For more quirky news - real and fake - see CAPA's funny blog Birdstrike.
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