I’ll explain how Ita will really take off after Alitalia. Facts and problems
ENG: facts, comments and scenarios. The analysis of Gaetano Intrieri
Well yes, finally here we are! Europe said yes. More than 1 year has passed since ITA should have sailed the skies, but nothing of what was declared by a bevy of various Ministers and politicians who succeeded each other in these infamous 4 years of Alitalia's extraordinary administration, has actually ever occurred. Yet it was simple, it was enough to read the regulations on air transport in order not to waste a year in vain and avoid further burdening the pockets of the Italian taxpayer. These regulations are the synthesis and the logical consequence of the "Deregulation act" with which in the 1970s the United States of America decided to make the civil aviation industry a business open to the market and inspired by the Pareto principles of competition, the only way to make a capital-intensive business model such as air transport sustainable over time. Never, ever for how conceived ITA could have gotten the green light from Europe by persevering in the follies that we have read in recent years from politicians who have become aviation experts in a flash or from experts and last-minute consultants who are always ready to have their say. to sit on any cadrega. Never, ever air transport could have waived 40 years of regulations, laws and guidelines resulting from Deregulation.
Since September 2019, in the articles written for Start Magazine , I have repeatedly highlighted the impossibility of establishing a new entity that could fly in continuity with Alitalia without having solved the problems that made Alitalia a company unable to compete on the market. For example, I anticipated by 1 year the 108 findings that the European Commission found when someone thought of doing to the "volemose bene" of Italic culture. But contemptuous of the regulations and advised by totally unrelated or incompetent characters about the world of air transport, the Italian governments that succeeded each other from 2018 to today following improvised theories and without any industrial logic have gone ahead with the blinders towards ITA which in their imagination had to be vehicle to ensure Alitalia's continuity after the third default. This could never have happened unless we disavowed the last 40 years of aviation around the world and in fact, it hasn't.
ITA today gets the green light from Europe just because it has nothing to do with Alitalia. ITA is a technically completely new entity, which will have to start the procedures for obtaining the Air Operator License from scratch and which will be able to use Alitalia assets only in total discontinuity and through the award of the same through regular tenders to which also other subjects will be able to participate and I am personally convinced that in the announcement that will involve the Alitalia brand, there will be several subjects who will participate at least two of them I know them personally.
Hence, thanks to a wicked policy in the management of the Alitalia affair, the paradox has been reached that the vehicle that was supposed to guarantee its continuity in terms of business model and employment levels, always at the expense of Italian taxpayers, actually decrees irremediably the end. What remains is always the money of the Italian taxpayers which will be used to get a company off the ground that has no industrial logic and which is also a prisoner of competition regulations since it is owned by the State and which through the mouth of its CEO candidly declares that it has proceeded to draft 15 different interpretations of an industrial plan in order to satisfy the requests of the European Commission. Translated it means I don't have any strategy consistent with the market, I don't know where to start but what matters is to start somehow in order to spend the Italians' money.
It is evident that ITA as conceived is the Waterloo of all the players in the field:
of the politicians who, with the exception of the mayor of Fiumicino, have lost even the slightest credibility on the Alitalia affair,
unions who, like a broken record, wanted Europe to repudiate 40 years of air transport regulations,
of those that politics has appointed to Alitalia in AS from 2017 to today who have succeeded in the extraordinary feat of achieving a "failure within failure".
Unfortunately, however, among the losers there are also the thousands of Alitalia employees who together with the employees of Air Italy and very soon I fear of another Italian airline will find themselves at best kept by the Italian taxpayers through layoffs. Human resources, often highly qualified, whose human and professional dignity has been uprooted through the fault of villainous managers who without any expertise in the matter or without any leadership skills in a complex sector such as that of air transport, in order to satisfy their unbridled ambition to Handymen or conquerors of cadreghe have been responsible for an economic and social disaster without equal in the history of this country by squandering billions of euros of public money and in fact leaving thousands of human beings in despair.
And here, as if all this were not enough that the day after this massacre in economic and social terms is definitively sanctioned, the Italian government decides to receive with great fanfare Mr. Michael O'Leary, aka MOL, the man who has made Ryan Air great.
Let's face it right away, MOL is a genius, a very well-trained manager who knows the process mechanisms of an airline and negotiator of rare effectiveness. Only those unfamiliar with aviation can make a fool of themselves by declaiming that Ryan Air's luck are the contributions he received from Italian airports that actually weigh on Ryan's budgets for infinitesimal percentages. Actually Ryan is a perfect machine managed through a solid and sustainable strategy whose real strength lies in the control of costs and process efficiency, which is the basis of his extraordinary entrepreneurial success. MOL has learned like no one the lesson of Herb Kelleher, the extraordinary founder of Southwest, the American airline that today represents the greatest entrepreneurial success in the history of air transport, and has adapted and shaped it to the European reality by implementing a Low Cost model. which has guaranteed him a sustainable competitive advantage over time.
But MOL is not only a genius of air transport, MOL is also a world "paraculo" who, leveraging on his extraordinary competence, manages to turn his interlocutors like real pedals, especially when he understands that on the other side there is emptiness. absolute in terms of skills and it is thus that while an unparalleled social drama is being consumed, he promises to obtain the cancellation of the boarding taxes relating to the municipal surcharge which would mean a benefit of about 300 million for Ryan's accounts. to collaborate with the newborn ITA in a feeder project on the main Italian airports that he is the first to know is impossible considering the organization of Ryan Air's internal process mechanisms. But it does not stop there, it goes further !!, and here, having abandoned any form of inhibitory restraint and well aware of the skills of the audience to which it is addressed, decant 4 billion investments in Italy which as a consequence would have created 4 thousand jobs work.
Too bad that in this shoot of generosity we forget that the 4 billion investment in the fleet only enriches Ryan and his shareholders because it is dictated only by the contingencies of the current airplane market and certainly not by philanthropic sentiments towards this unfortunate country. But anyhow, for over 20 years he has understood how this country works and he wallows in the maze of incompetence and the carelessness of others like no one.
In the meantime, as we said, ITA will be born which I anticipate will not be an airline, but only a container with two airplanes (one short-haul and one long-haul) that will be used to fly under the ACMI form. In detail, ITA will be responsible for selling the tickets but at least initially it will necessarily have to use another carrier from which it will have to buy capacity with the money of the Italians and who will this carrier be? It will be Alitalia in AS that in this way and with this stratagem will appropriate additional public money that will be used to arrive at the definitive grounding.
Alitalia, 70 years of history of this country, with that historic brand of rare penetration that will be mortified to the end because it is forced to act as a capacity provider for ITA before definitively closing down, this is because Alitalia is not even allowed to die with dignity in the land of toys.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/smartcity/italia-alitalia/ on Sun, 18 Jul 2021 07:51:58 +0000.