Keynote: IATA

Transcript

Alexandre de Juniac:Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, it's a pleasure to join this summit. Thank you to CAPA, Peter, and thank you Qatar Airways, dear Akbar, for your hospitality, and your team have done a fantastic job, as usual, in organizing this summit. We know that aviation is a highly regulated industry, and much of that regulation is founded on global standards and is founded on the Chicago Convention. 2 months ago, on the 7th of December, we celebrated the 75th anniversary of the Chicago Convention. And if you remember, the Second World War was raging in Europe, in the Pacific, and a team of countries decided to look forward. And to establish the basis of this convention to, I quote, greatly help to create and preserve friendship and understanding among the nations and the peoples of the world. That was forward-looking in that period. A few months later, on the 19th of April 1945, airlines came together with a vision for IATA, an association that would enable air transport, I quote, to benefit the people of the world. Over the next 75 years, IATA has promoted safe, efficient, and sustainable services for everyone. And by working together with governments, the freedom to fly has reached more and more people, In 1945, 9 million people traveled by air. Today, we transport the same number of people on average every 18 hours. So things have evolved. And one of the reasons why it has been so successful is that our business is based on global standards, and the regulation is based on global standards. In 1945, it was a different world. It was 4 years before the first passenger jet and decades before the computing power of today. But the most fundamental principle of the Chicago Convention, that aviation needs global standards to operate efficiently, remains true. Global standards and regulation have evolved over the decades with the industry. Most of the time, this has been a positive evolution, but we have seen also difficulties. The industry has also suffered very well-intentioned regulatory efforts that have not produced the desired results. The classic example is the US tarmac delay rule. US regulators wanted to eliminate excessive tarmac delays to improve the travel experience, even in difficult situations like extreme weather conditions. They set the fines so high that long tarmac delays have virtually disappeared. Is it a good result? Not really. Airlines are incentivized to preemptively cancel flights rather than risk a long delay, and a cancelled flight is never good news and a good outcome for travelers. As I said in this forum last year, airlines are not against regulation. We need smart regulation. It means a real solution to a real problem, a calculated benefit that outweighs the cost, taking into account industry expertise for efficient implementation, and aligned with global standards. I hope that you will agree that this is a good common-sense framework for your important discussions at this conference. I would like to highlight the continued criticality of global standards to this industry some 75 years after the founding of the International Civil Aviation Organization and of IATA. I will give you 4 specific examples about the challenges and the crisis that our industry is facing today. The first is climate change. This is a crisis that science tells us is caused by carbon emissions. Aircraft burn kerosene that emits carbon, and aviation's contribution to man-made carbon emissions is 2%, a figure that has been stable in relative terms to other polluters despite the rapid growth of aviation. In absolute terms, however, aviation's emissions were growing, so we committed to cap aviation's net emissions with carbon-neutral growth from 2020. For a carbon-intensive industry with no alternative power source, to make that commitment in 2009 was a major step. And early on, we recognized that achieving this would require the industry to work together with common goals. One of those goals was to set governments to implement a single global economic measure To help us get there, for sure, the industry would continue to improve technology, operations, infrastructure. We knew that these alone would not be sufficient, and we also knew that our capabilities will be compromised if a patchwork of environmental regulation, taxes, and charges emerged. We were successful. Corsia, the carbon offsetting and reduction scheme for international aviation that Akbar mentioned in his speech, was agreed at the ICAO Assembly in 2016. It was my first interaction with the ICAO process, and I was impressed by the spirit and ambition and compromise that underpin the global standard approach. Governments must now keep that commitment. Too many, including my own country, are inventing taxes in the name of environment. This siphon money that we could invest in sustainability projects. Do you believe that the eco tax in France funds other transportation means? Aviation funds train and the road. Is it acceptable? I don't think so. And of course, it undermine all these taxes and charges undermine the effectiveness of Corsia and the political consensus on which it is built. If we look beyond carbon neutral growth, we have an even tougher. 2050 goal to reduce our net emissions to half 2005 levels, irrespective of growth. Here, here too, global standards have a role to play. We have to find a way to finance sustainable fuels and to convince government to help us. That's a key element. To scale these up to commercial levels, governments must set regulatory and legal framework. To stimulate the sustainable aviation fuels that will contribute or could contribute up to 80% of our carbon emission reduction. So it's a key element. Second example, infrastructure. It's absolutely critical in infrastructure that we have global standards. We are facing, we know, an infrastructure crisis. There is more demand than capacity, and global standards are helping to manage. the available capacity. As with environment, the industry is united. IATA, airports, and the Worldwide Airport Coordinators Group work together to modernize the Worldwide Slot Guidelines, now called the Worldwide Airport Slot Guidelines. And we— and now we jointly govern the future development of slots. Thank you, Alexandre. By engaging policymakers together, we are bolstering the value of this tested system, providing and allocating airport capacity for airlines to serve the needs of their customers in a competitive market that creates opportunities for new entrants. A consistent, transparent, fair, and free slot allocation system is the goal, and that rests on everyone involved in the process. So I'm sure you will have a good discussion on this topic, which is key for our industry. Third example is certification. It's another crisis that we have faced, the way we certify aircraft with the continuing situation of the Boeing 737 MAX. How could a system of certifying the safety of aircraft built over decades of continuous improvements in safety produce an aircraft that had 2 tragic accidents in such a short timeframe? That's a valid question. And as with any safety issue, the most important action that we can take is to learn from what happened and apply that learning to make flying even safer. Boeing is hard at work providing regulators with the information and answers needed, needed to bring the 737 MAX back into service. Each regulator has responsibility for doing this in their individual market, and there is no doubt that every— that they are taking this responsibility diligently. But from a public confidence perspective, the greater the alignment of requirements and timelines, the better. Looking ahead, we must keep this in mind when considering any improvements to the way that aircraft are certified. Regulators must be able to trust and mutually recognize their certifying colleagues around the world. If not, what is the public supposed to think? After all, they use air transport to fly from one jurisdiction to another. Surely, it must be considered as safe where it lands and where it takes off. Fourth example, and the last one, is the issue that is top of mind globally today. The novel coronavirus, 2019-nCoV. Viruses are nasty things. The world has a lot of experience with them. In 2003, SARS infected 8,000 people and claimed the lives of some 800. The estimate of the swine flu H1N1 outbreak of 2009 are between 150,000 and 575,000 fatalities, and the World Health Organization calculates annual deaths from seasonal flu between 290,000 and 650,000. So it should not come as no surprise and give great reassurance that we have a global framework to help contain outbreaks. These are the International Health Regulations, IHR, built under the leadership of the World Health Organization, WHO. The global mobility that aviation creates is a factor in virus spread, so we work closely with the WHO with the objective of being able to operationalize what public health authorities need us to do. We have also defined industry standards to keep our passengers and crew safe and healthy. This includes guidance for crew, frontline, cleaning and maintenance staff, among others. And they are endorsed by WHO and in some cases including in the IHR. The effectiveness of these standards is assisted by several factors. Supplied air on modern aircraft is as safe as that of an operating theatre thanks to advanced filtering systems. Communicating good hygiene practices to passengers helps. That's simple advice like washing your hands frequently or sneezing into your elbow or a tissue. And there are various screening measures— thermal and manual— at strategic airports to keep potentially infected passengers off airplanes. The WHO's recent declaration that we are in a Public Health Emergency of International Concern is part of the IHR plan, and it did not mean the people's individual safety had taken a turn for the worse. Rather, it indicated that the scale of the situation requires governments to cooperate to contain and hopefully eliminate the virus. So the best minds in the world on outbreaks have used our previous experience to build the AIHR for precisely these occasions. Some countries, China among them, are taking extraordinary measures to contain the virus. If there is a needed further call to action, it would be to first stay the course and follow the plan, and second, be mindful of the capacity of the public health authorities in developing countries where there are gaps. The global community there needs to support. My last thought on this topic is to highlight that aviation is an industry that rises to challenges. As of Sunday, 2nd February, the Civil Aviation Administration of China has reported that over 4,000 relief flights performed by commercial airlines in China delivered over 600,000 pieces of virus prevention materials to affected areas. Chinese airlines have also helped bring some 7,500 medical staff to where they are needed. Airlines are helping with the evacuation of foreign nationals from the affected areas, the delivery of samples to labs, the transport of experts to areas in distress, and much more. Usually, I conclude my speeches with a reminder that aviation is a business of freedom as my friend Akbar has mentioned, business of freedom. In the context of the virus outbreak, I challenged myself if it was still appropriate, and I came to the conclusion it is. The freedom that aviation provides is critical to the world in which we live. With the help of good regulation, we constantly improve safety, efficiency, and sustainability. We have a critical role to play in containing and eventually solving this current crisis. History shows us that the demand for the freedom, the freedom to fly, is ever-growing. The next months will certainly be challenging for the air transport industry and for governments, and together we will get through this virus outbreak, and together we will continue to build the global standards and regulations that will enable the industry, the business of freedom, well and even better into the future. Thank you for your attention. Thank you, Alexandre.

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