The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Buckinghamshire

Two more photos from last weekend. This is what I walked around in near Tring on Sunday:

down well-marked paths:

That, I tell you, is England. Which I hope very much will stay in the United Kingdom.

Tate Modern

I visited the Tate Modern on Saturday to see their new building and snapped some photos. Here's the north face with the Millennium Bridge off to the left:

A better photo of the west entrance foyer:

And one of the staircases in the new building:

Later today or tomorrow, a couple photos of my hike in Buckinghamshire.

 

Brexit and aviation

Cranky Flier points out that while tourism to the UK is really a great deal right now (as I'd attest), it's going to be a lot more expensive if Brexit actually happens:

Today the UK is part of the European Common Aviation Area (CAA). That means that UK-based airlines can fly anywhere within Europe they want, just as if they were based in any of those other European countries. The same goes for European airlines flying within the UK. It also means that bilateral agreements negotiated by the EU with third parties outside the EU apply to the UK. And there are a host of European aviation regulations that govern air travel in the UK as well. Some or all of this may go away completely when the break-up occurs. That is to be determined by those negotiating the terms.

...[T]he EU may decide it doesn’t want the UK in the CAA anymore. That would be quite the blow to the UK, but it would be a warning shot for anyone else contemplating the same thing. I keep coming back to that castle scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

That would mean that the UK and the EU would need to set up a more traditional bilateral agreement. It would be shocking if those restrictions didn’t include a ban on UK-based airlines from flying within the EU. That would mean foreign ownership rules would apply. For EU-based airlines this wouldn’t be a huge issue. They’d probably lose the ability to fly domestically within the UK and they couldn’t be majority-owned by a UK shareholder anymore. That’s not really an issue.

For the UK, however, it’s bad news. Think about easyJet, a UK-based airline that criss-crosses the EU all day every day. It would no longer be able to do that. Instead it would be forced to create an EU-based subsidiary, of which it could presumably only own 49 percent, and then have that company handle the intra-EU flying. Half the profits of that company would go into the EU instead of to the UK as they do today. The airline is already investigating this possibility. This wouldn’t hurt easyJet other than adding a little more complexity, but it would hurt the UK.

Yesterday, I thought of a different problem, but related not just to Brexit but to the general British mindset of never wanting to change anything. That problem is Heathrow. It's not fun connecting through Heathrow to go anywhere, mainly because it's only got two runways servicing its five spread-out terminals. Compare that with, say, Amsterdam's Schiphol, or Munich, or even Brussels, and it's difficult to see how Brexit doesn't make Heathrow even less attractive than its continental competitors.

The UK will screw itself by leaving the EU so many ways that porn stars will be flabbergasted. Aviation is just one small area of this.

What did we learn?

I'm heading home from London having talked to dozens of people about last Thursday's vote. No conclusions yet, or at least none that really challenged my earlier beliefs that the vote itself was a bad idea that went badly. Jeremy Corbyn probably thinks so too at this point. (Link when I'm back on a real computer.)

Let's see what Parliament screws up while I'm in the air.

At least the exchange rate cushions the blow immediately. Sterling is about £1 = $1.35 today, which changed the economics of the Duty Free shop quite a bit just now.

Bit of a hike

Today was pretty full. I took a train to Tring, hiked for two hours, came back to London, and walked around Kensington for a couple more. Now it's 11pm on Sunday night and everything is closed.

I won't have all the photos I took yesterday and today ready until I get back to Chicago, but here are a couple. First, the Tate Modern:

Second, this guy, who rode in my train carriage on the way back from Tring:

These are just from my phone. I did lug my real camera all over the hills of Buckinghamshire today, so I'll have real photos later in the week.

The Ancestral Homeland

I'm traveling to the Land of Uk (aka The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) next week, which got me wondering if I've actually seen the country in every month of the year. So I worked it out, and yes, as of 1 September 2013, I've seen the UK in every month of the year:

January 2001, 2010, 2011
February 2001, 2010, 2015
March 2012, 2014
April 2011
May 2009, 2015
June 1992, 2014, 2015, 2016*
July 1992
August 2009, 2013
September 2013, 2015
October 2002, 2009, 2012, 2014
November 2001, 2009, 2010
December 2002, 2014, 2015

* Planned

In all, I've made 34 discrete trips to the UK since my first on 11 June 1992, with 31 arrivals at Heathrow, 2 at Gatwick, and 1 at Dover (by ferry from Belgium). Oddly, only half—17—have been on non-stop flights from O'Hare. And I've never flown non-stop from O'Hare to any UK airport other than Heathrow.

File this away under "personal trivia."

Cranky Flier annoyed by American's changes

The Cranky Flier blog noted American Airlines' changes to its frequent-flier program (which I also noted yesterday) but thinks they dropped the ball on it:

Are you as unimpressed as I am? I get that there’s something to be said for conformity. It makes it easier for travelers to compare what they’ll get from each airline, but it also means that nobody’s program stands out. (Well, nobody except for Alaska Airlines, which is keeping its old style of program and will probably win even more fans.)

The problem here is that airlines have become too reliant on their frequent flier programs. It’s not about earning someone’s loyalty either. The award miles side of the house is all about making money. Airlines make a boat load of cash selling miles to partners, and they don’t want that to end. Then on the elite miles side, there is the issue of alliance-wide benefits. Plus, they need to convince people they have a chance of upgrading, even though that’s becoming less and less likely to occur every day.

I can only imagine that these constraints make airlines like American think inside a very small box when they try to rethink loyalty. Instead of actually making improvements, they just shuffle the deck chairs. What’s changed now with this new program? Well it’s a whole lot more complex, that’s for sure. And all this added complexity doesn’t solve the problem that airlines wanted to fix with their mileage-based programs. It just trades one problem for another.

He makes a good point. Unfortunately for me in 2017, it doesn't matter; my 8-year Platinum run is probably ending next March, because I'm just not traveling that much this year. Pity.