Addio Alitalia

On October 5 and 10 I traveled up and down from Rome to Nice. With Alitalia and with a little over an hour delay on the way there and a little less back. I was just in time, because the next day 270 flights were grounded by a protest strike against the planned liquidation of Alitalia, which will be completed on October 15.

Then the flight of the Forwards (wings) of Italy and an uncertain future begins for three quarters of the approximately 10.000 employees. And of the travelers, because it remains to be seen whether the little good company ATI, which must rise from the ashes of Alitalia, can reach enough destinations.

Melancholy and relief

On my last flight with the Italian state airline, I also buried her in my mind. With a mixture of melancholy and relief. Melancholy because after all these years I had become attached to that green-white-red logo with the flattened A like the snout of an airplane.

But also a relief because it was high time that this soap opera came to an end. Alitalia is no more, and nothing but good from the dead. But a company that has never been profitable in the past 30 years and that has swallowed 7,4 billion euros in tax money has forfeited its credit.

In recent decades, Alitalia has been notorious for the willingness to strike on the part of its staff, who are divided over many categorical unions and federations. Many travelers will therefore have opted for the competition wherever possible, but that was not the main reason for Alitalia's failure. It was in a fatal cocktail of mismanagement, political influence and misplaced nationalism.

rate walls

In the 80's there was no blemish in the air. Alitalia was protected by tariff walls – I remember that foreign companies were not allowed to go below Alitalia prices so that you could not buy a ticket for Schiphol for less than 500 guilders – and as a public company formed a rich reservoir of jobs and votes for politicians and their clientele .

This came to an end with the liberalization of airspace in the 90s. But while other airlines responded by forming alliances and targeting lucrative international and continental flights, Alitalia kept to itself and specialized in shorter flights, especially domestically.

The goose that lays the golden eggs was the Rome-Milan route. The most expensive air miles in Europe were readily paid for by politicians and entrepreneurs, with money from the company and the community. With the rise of the price fighters, that choice has turned out to be a complete miss. And who still flies from Rome to Milan, now that the fast train takes you to the city center within three hours in an ecologically responsible manner?

Collaboration with KLM

The company went into crisis, with heavy losses, capital injections, forced reorganizations and waves of strikes. In 1996 the government was faced with the choice between bankruptcy or looking for an international partner. It was eventually found in the form of our own KLM.

It seemed like a well-functioning marriage of convenience: the two were stronger together and the routes complemented each other nicely. It was agreed that Alitalia would also be privatized, but when it turned out that Italian politics had no intention of giving up such a source of power, the english volanti, (flying Dutchmen, as Italian journalists invariably write) screaming away.

Rather than come under the care of the Italian state holding company IRI, KLM paid a lump sum of 250 million euros, which turned out to be a good investment.

That was in 2000. Eight years later, the scenario repeated itself, when after another series of losses, government contributions, labor disputes and furious travelers, Air France-KLM was prepared to take over the languishing Alitalia. But again it fell short in the nick of time, this time at the hands of Berlusconi.

Italianness

In the 2008 election campaign, the leader of Forza Italia made a fervent plea for the preservation of the Italianness of the national airline and, as an alternative to Air France-KLM, he proposed a consortium of wealthy Italian entrepreneurs friends, which he presented as captaini coraggiosi, brave helmsmen.

He won the elections with it, but a new agony began for Alitalia. The company was split into a bad company with the debts, for which the taxpayer was then allowed to pay, and a good company   capitani who, however, turned out not to be benefactors, but mainly interested in their own interests.

For example, the owner of a bankrupt private airline could now lease his planes to Alitalia for good money and the Benetton family was rewarded by the new Berlusconi government with the extension of the concession to operate the Italian airline. highways. And we saw how that happened three years ago with the collapse of the Morandi Bridge in Genoa.

Arabs

Privatization Italian-style was not a success. The new owners once again focused on the domestic market, which had become an anachronistic choice. The result was new losses and a diligent search for an international partner. The enthusiasm for Alitalia had dwindled considerably, but in 2014 Etihad, the airline of the United Arab Emirates, appeared willing to take a 51% share.

Two years later, when losses had risen to more than a million a day, a new reorganization plan was presented, which was accepted by the unions but subsequently voted down by the staff in a referendum. That dug its own grave, because Alitalia was now technically bankrupt.

The Arabs and smaller shareholders withdrew and the government took back control. It kept Alitalia afloat with yet another 'bridging loan' (of 900 million), which of course was not repaid and was therefore challenged by the EU as disguised state aid.

But that didn't help either. No one was more willing to take over the bankrupt estate. The populist government of 2018 tried to sell Alitalia to indigenous shareholders like railways and postal services, which was, of course, state aid in another form, but the downturn had become unstoppable.

A new company

The corona pandemic, which has hit aviation worldwide hard, caused the death. A year ago, the government approved the bankruptcy of Alitalia and the start of a new company under the wings of the Ministry of Finance called ITA: Italia Trasporto Aereo.

That will be a lot more modest than the former company of bandiera (flag bearer) and certainly offer fewer flights to domestic destinations. (There are now 18 from Rome alone.) We'll see if that is enough for a successful restart.