Tony Tyler, Director General & CEO, "ŽInternational Air Transport Association (IATA)
Tyler has highlighted the outlook for airline"™s financial performance, how the industry is fairing on safety front, climate change agreement at ICAO and why is the industry being so proactive on this issue, how can governments be more aware of the benefits of supporting aviation, etc.
Q. What"™s the current outlook for airline"™s financial performance and what are the factors?
A. We are forecasting improvement for performance of 2016 over 2015. We are looking for an industry profit globally this year from 39.4 billion dollars, which will be a record level. Some of the factors of course the low fuel price is helping but overall the industries in a more zillion condition than it was some time ago and it"™s in a better structure, airlines raw more officially, the load factors are up using more efficient equipment, so generally speaking despite certain economic background the airlines are producing some good results.
Q. What"™s the latest on Latin America and Venezuela?
A. About 3.8 billion dollars of airline money is stuck in Venezuela and unable to be repatriated and remitted to back to airline"™ home countries. That number remained pretty much the same for last certainly 12 months because airlines have stopped selling in the country and local currency. Its accused form of airlines, we saw Lufthansa decided only this last week to pull out of Venezuela, Air Canada decided that some time ago, every airline operating there has reduced capacity significantly in its frequency. This can"™t be doing the country any good because what it needs is connectivity to trade with the rest of the world and we call on the government to release the funds and that airlines get their operating cost back.
Q. Safety is obviously top-of-mind right now, how is the industry fairing on this front and what is IATA doing?
A. Overall, it"™s a very safe time for the industry, I mean last year"™s safety performance beat the five year average and although of course we had a couple of terrible tragedies last year which were not accidents they were caused deliberately by human action. What we"™re doing as IATA is we are tightening up our IATA operations safety audit which has become a global benchmark and safety management for some 400 of the world"™s top airlines. That"™s now becoming a system of continual assessment and a continual safety management rather than just a snapshot every couple of years and we are encouraging governments all around the world to adopt it as a part of their regulatory regime.
Q. Security has made the news in the USA in the past week, but is an ongoing issue after the Brussels attacks. What more needs to be done on this?
A. Of Course government in the short time needs to make sure they"™ve got enough resources to keep the lines moving. In the medium term though what we need to do is prevent these lines from happening in the first place and we have a programme, we call smarter security which aims to do that by working with the airports. We are working with airports council international to implement new technologies to visual all risk based systems of security screening so that we can actually get rid of these lines altogether by doing thing a bit smarter. We need to improve facilitation at airports, we need to go for more alternative systems, and we need to make sure that everybody can have his boarding card on his mobile phone or print it out at home so he doesn"™t have to queue up at a check in desk. Home printed bag tags, we now have a standard for those, we are trying to get those adopted so that people won"™t be queuing up to drop their bags off, the bag will already be tagged before they even get to the airport. If we can reduce the amount of congestion, the amount of queuing, we will also reduce the vulnerability of airport crowds, to terrorist outrages like we saw in Brussels.
Q. How confident are you of the climate change agreement at ICAO and why is the industry being so proactive on this issue?
A. The industry wants a global market base measure to help manages its carbon emissions. It wants that because really that"™s its license to grow. This industry needs to grow, it wants to grow, but we have to manage our carbon emissions which is why we have set the target of carbon neutral growth from 2020. To deliver that we need governments to deliver as ICAO in its tri annual assembly in September-October this year. How confident am I? Well, I"™m hopeful, I"™m also reasonably confident but there is a lot of work to be done to bring governments into alignment before we can say with 100% confidence that we going to get that…
