Source: ICAO At a virtual meeting with the region’s aviation leaders yesterday, ICAO Secretary General Dr. Fang Liu joined the agency’s North American, Central American, and Caribbean (NACC) Regional Director, Mr. Melvin Cintron, in highlighting how NACC States could become an example on how to optimize air travel and tourism in aid of wider regional recovery and growth objectives through enhanced coordination.   “While public health is, and must remain, the overriding priority for civil societies, the critical role played by air transport in crisis response and general economic recovery must not be under-estimated,” she noted. “ICAO and its Member States clearly recognize that the COVID-19 pandemic is not only a health crisis – it is also an economic and [...]

Source: ICAO In delivering her Opening Remarks to the World Economic Forum (WEF) ‘Pathways to a Cyber Resilient Aviation Ecosystem’ virtual event earlier today, ICAO Secretary General Dr. Fang Liu underscored the importance of the close and effective partnerships now established among States and industry, and the urgency of keeping those partnerships “vibrant and productive.”   Dr. Liu explored the key cyber resilience priorities for aviation now being addressed by ICAO, noting that as the air transport sector continues to modernize and digitize, cyber risks still threaten the data, systems, and technological infrastructure of airports, airlines, and air navigation service providers, as well as many other service suppliers.   “This digital penetration will only increase with time,” she explained, “especially [...]

Source: ICAO Opening the fourth consecutive edition of ICAO’s ‘Drone Enable’ Symposium yesterday, ICAO Secretary General Dr. Fang Liu acknowledged that traditional aviation continues to undergo a fundamental evolution in light of the increasingly widespread use of unmanned aircraft systems, or UAS, as well as related modernization trends associated with digital communications and the emergence of advanced air mobility operators and other new entrants.   “We are now routinely seeing new types of aircraft, new use-cases, and new types of operations sharing airspace with traditional aviation,” Dr. Liu emphasized, “and this includes new businesses and humanitarian operations leveraging unmanned aviation technologies to better peoples’ lives, as exemplified by the transport of UN COVAX vaccine shipments from ports to hard-to-reach inland [...]

Source: ICAO Opening the fourth consecutive edition of ICAO’s ‘Drone Enable’ Symposium yesterday, ICAO Secretary General Dr. Fang Liu acknowledged that traditional aviation continues to undergo a fundamental evolution in light of the increasingly widespread use of unmanned aircraft systems, or UAS, as well as related modernization trends associated with digital communications and the emergence of advanced air mobility operators and other new entrants.   “We are now routinely seeing new types of aircraft, new use-cases, and new types of operations sharing airspace with traditional aviation,” Dr. Liu emphasized, “and this includes new businesses and humanitarian operations leveraging unmanned aviation technologies to better peoples’ lives, as exemplified by the transport of UN COVAX vaccine shipments from ports to hard-to-reach inland [...]

Source: ACI LAC The Airports Council International Latin America and the Caribbean (ACI-LAC), the Latin American and Caribbean Air Transport Association (ALTA), and the International Air Transport Association (IATA) have renewed  their call to governments in Latin America and the Caribbean in regards of the need to plan in advance and in a coordinated manner so that commercial aviation can resume once the new mobility restrictions are lifted in the region. The industry understands that governments’ primary focus is on dealing with the public health crisis. Nevertheless, the sector has been devised and implemented the necessary policies and procedures to allow aviation to safely operate during the pandemic. The recent tightening of travel restrictions has forced airlines into last minute flight cancellations [...]

Source: ICAO Speaking to the UNWTO Global Tourism Crisis Committee and Commission for the Middle East yesterday, ICAO Secretary General Dr. Fang Liu noted that ongoing pandemic impacts on international mobility reveal that the world is “back to 2003 levels in terms of global seat capacity.” “Here in the Middle East, passenger totals dropped by over 70% and recovery in general is proceeding more slowly than in some other areas of the world, mainly due to the high levels of international passenger movements here,” Dr. Liu emphasized. Stressing that the precipitous decline in air traffic continues to present severe liquidity strains to companies and suppliers throughout the air transport and tourism value chains, the ICAO Secretary General identified three key [...]