When IATA’s Director General/CEO Giovanni Bisignani, labelled a new departure tax in Germany as "the worst kind of short-sighted policy irresponsibility", he was speaking in the knowledge that, unusually, both the airline and airport fraternities would be as one with him. This is not the first time a national government has chosen to target the aviation sector for a stealth tax and with national budget deficits growing right across the continent it won’t be the last. IATA estimates it will add a EUR2 billion per annum burden on aviation in a region that has just lost that amount to the disruption caused by the ash cloud. The question is: what is less dormant right now, Eyafallajökull or the politicians’ collective desire to tax aviation until the pips squeak?