Aviation International News senior correspondent Ian Goold has been involved in aerospace since 1964 and in aviation media for more than 40 years. He enjoyed a 20-year career at Flight International magazine, where he was latterly air-transport editor before turning freelance in 1993. A winner of the European Regions Airline Association Hank McGonagle award for excellence in aerospace journalism and a Royal Aeronautical Society Aerospace Journalist of the Year global&nbsp;award, he has edited or contributed to aerospace and aviation magazines, special publications, and websites in Africa, Asia/Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America. Ian entered aerospace as an apprentice at the British Aircraft Corporation at Brooklands (Weybridge), where he worked on production and final assembly lines of the Vickers Super VC10, and BAC One-Eleven , and manufacture of Concorde major sub-assemblies. He subsequently graduated from the BAC Design Training School to work in the airframe structures drawing office (including design of international future projects, such as the Panavia Tornado multi-role combat aircraft) before joining Flight International in 1973. Apart from years of reading aircraft magazines and books, his first direct contact with aviation media had come during the early 1970s when he was involved at Brooklands with the Weybridge Man-powered Aircraft Group, which designed and built the tenth aircraft to fly under purely human power. As an aviation journalist, he has worked at more than&nbsp; 50 of the major biennial&nbsp;global and regional international aerospace industry shows at Le Bourget, Farnborough, Singapore, and Dubai (having missed attending only one "Farnborough" since 1960), plus innumerable NBAA, HAI, (U.S.) AOPA, and EBACE Conventions and ERA Assemblies. His favourite aircraft is the Hawker Hunter, of which – as a schoolboy – he heard hundreds make their first flights from Dunsfold, where also on September 24, 2013, he saw the penultimate landing of the VC10 (happily involving an example of which he had witnessed the maiden takeoff in 1970) a day before the last example made the design's final flight (unless, of course....).

Senior correspondent

Ian Goold

Despite evident post-recession traffic recovery, last month’s European Regions Airline Association general assembly in Barcelona was accompanied by the sound of axes being ground for the lobby group’s latest fight against regulators and legislators. To long-running concerns about flawed European Union passenger-rights compensation, airport slot allocation and other legislation, ERA officials now have added their complaints about costs incurred in the aftermath of the eruption of Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajoekull in April.
ERA members cancelled some 9,668 flights–almost 13 percent of the 74,814 services they had planned–when huge swathes of European airspace closed during April 2010. While central Europe accounted for 43 percent of lost flights and Nordic airspace a further third, flights operating in eastern and southern areas of the region escaped relatively lightly, incurring 12 percent and 10 percent of the disruption.
Even though the ERA reported that first-half 2010 passenger traffic ran 2.9 percent above last year’s recessionary levels (or a likely 6 percent sans volcanic ash), “outraged” delegates pressed for the group to seek a legal remedy. They have instructed the ERA directorate to take “any opportunity for instigating a class action to recover damages” arising from European national governments’ failure to compensate them for events totally beyond their control. 
&nbsp;“Europe’s politicians have sat on their hands for far too long,” said ERA director general Mike Ambrose. “Airlines have lost patience and been forced to seek alternative legal solutions to recover the additional costs they incurred. The events in April showed that air transport is an essential element of our society; it is now time for governments to recognize the value [the industry] brings to the economy and the European communities it serves.”

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