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A review of Central European private aviation

05/12/2014 by Aviation Times

Commercial aviation is been celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. IATA, the scheduled international airlines’ association, has been at the forefront of promoting this milestone. Which is ironic: the flight was a biz-av one.

It may be ironic, but sadly, it is also typical. The commercial airlines are never slow to take good ideas that the business aviation community generate and use them for their own advantage.

But it does not have to be a one way street. The commercial aviation industry is 100 years young. If there is one thing that we have learnt from the last century is that it is when there are challenges the industry responds best. In that context, east Europe is a fascinating laboratory. It is hard to imagine a more complex operating environment in the region since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Operators in the region currently have to navigate political upheaval, infrastructure challenges, economic uncertainty, competition and operational issues simultaneously. In other words, it is an environment custom built for business aviation.

In the old days, as with commercial aviation, operators could rely on antediluvian regulation to build a huge fence around their operations. They could be fat dumb and lazy. Many of the legacy
commercial airlines still want that to happen. Hello. The eastern European legacy carriers know those days are gone. Go to Budapest, Warsaw or indeed Prague and you can see in an instant that things have changed, for ever, in ways that others in west Europe are slow to understand.

With risks and challenges in all directions, the Central European private aviation community has to add another issue – how to develop the business in the face of more established operators from other regions keen to swoop in and take the business away.

So what are the central and eastern European operators to do? At Aviation Advocacy, we have been involved in answering this question, from the front line, for several years. There are no magic tricks, but there are good ideas that we can use to work with you to grow your business. And yes, some of them come from the commercial airlines and our experience of working with them.

Any analysis needs to start with great data. Aviation Advocacy works with its associated firm WingX to fully understand the background and to find the opportunities. We call on our experience of working with infrastructure providers, including airports in the region and air traffic controller agencies, and the airlines to take the best from the best and to find that edge.

At one level, the solution is simple and you do not need consultants to do it. All you have to do is focus on costs, service, positioning and operations all at the same time. Easy. But frankly, few operations do not benefit from outside eyes, outside thinking and outside perspectives from time-to-time.

You operate in a complex part of the world, at a complicated time. It takes brains as well as brawn to succeed in this sort of environment, but as Frank Sinatra so wonderfully put it, ‘If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.’

by Andrew Charlton