Ita, here are flaws and turbulence of the new Alitalia
Will the new Alitalia called Ita really take off? Gaetano Intrieri's analysis
What we are witnessing regarding the Alitalia affair is the logical consequence of reckless choices and decisions implemented in the last year by the government, several times in the past year I wrote that the newco established at the moment called Ita, would not have in any case passed the European exam to obtain the requirements to become an aircraft operator and what is happening in these days is there to prove it.
The problem for Ita in obtaining the Air Operator License, as well as in the restrictions imposed by the competition rules that condition the establishment of a publicly owned airline, lies essentially in the perimeter of the assets that the newco should acquire from Alitalia in AS. It is clear that since the state owner of the new company, Europe, in order to protect competition in terms of state aid and free market, requires the total discontinuity of the new entity from Alitalia. Therefore, it is not clear how the dozens of technical certifications can be transferred in discontinuity from one company to another, necessary for obtaining the Air Operator Certificate which is a fundamental part of the operating license.
Just by way of example, it is enough to mention the Etops certification necessary to be able to operate at high distances from the mainland for twin-engine aircraft (for example to cross the ocean for routes to the Americas) and Category III which allows the airline to land. in conditions of low visibility. Well only these two regulation certification processes in hand require procedures that in the best of cases require at least 6 months of operations before they can be obtained, it would then be necessary to completely rewrite the manuals relating to Part M (maintenance) and part OPS (flight operations) to unless you want to re-propose the same inefficient and obsolete internal processes of Alitalia with the disastrous economic consequences we have witnessed in recent years and in any case discontinuity means that the manuals in any case will have to be drawn up from scratch and that therefore the regulator who in Italy is the 'ENAC will have the necessary time to test them and test them
But that's not all, with three billion instead according to the industrial plan of Ita, as announced by the Report transmission, about five thousand people should be sent home with a fleet that, like an accordion, should expand from 50 to 100 airplanes in a shine. Handling and maintenance services should also be separated without a plausible underlying strategy other than that of increasing costs, at least that behind all this there is not the usual Teutonic director who clearly already having these services at home would not have any use and therefore only in this context would this spin-off have a sensible underlying logic.
Beyond these two immediate considerations, Ita's path to obtain the operating license appears to be anything but obvious and certainly not due to the lack of capital if it really will have 3 billion euros. We must immediately reiterate here that with an investment of 3 billion euros you can really think of an airline with at least 300 aircraft in its fleet, and after all, just follow the criteria of the EEC regulation 1008/2008 and the related EAL 16 models to easily check what would be a coherent investment to a fleet of 300 aircraft, also considering the resilience of fixed costs that with that size threshold generate considerable economies of scale. Finally, another relevant issue is: if in discontinuity it is permissible to inherit the IATA position of the old Alitalia with the relative plate number of the Billing and Settlement Plan (BSP) which is the “055” that is placed before the numbering of the tickets issued by Alitalia. Having the same tag number would in fact mean establishing business continuity and if, on the other hand, you want to obtain a new number and therefore a new registration as an IATA member, the entire procedure would need at least 1 year to be implemented in the systems Iata at the levels of Alitalia's current BSP position in AS.
As if all this were not enough, the Industrial Plan presented by Ita as well as the one presented at the time by FS, is not an industrial plan of an airline and it cannot be lacking the fundamental and indispensable element on which an industrial plan is built in air transport: accounting for route profitability. It would therefore be interesting in the meantime to understand how much public money has been paid to draft this document which is totally wrong in its technical essence and the findings highlighted by the European Commission which makes use of real and sector consultants are there to prove it.
In the meantime, we are witnessing the disintegration of the old Alitalia in Extraordinary Administration, this too absolutely predictable and widely foreseen by me in my previous analyzes . Alitalia in AS should be the company that should transfer the assets, it is a pity that these assets, never restructured in 4 years of commissioner management, are now in total decay, which is "sensational" if you think that only in the last year Alitalia in AS benefited from direct grants and subsidies in the form of layoffs of approximately 1 billion euro. An enormous figure considering the size threshold of the company. Nobody knows how this huge sum of money was used by the last commissioner management which succeeded the previous one and which in turn had "pulverized" about 1 billion and 200 million. In summary, in 4 years of commissioner, about 2.5 billion euros of public money were "burned" to end up with a handful of flies in hand.
Ten thousand people risk in a short time of finding themselves without a job anymore due to reckless choices and without any industrial logic, dictated by a constant that has accompanied Alitalia in these 4 years: the total incompetence in the field of air transport of the protagonists who have followed one another in the political and managerial management of this affair, but as we know, in this country where "fancazzismo" reigns, skills are an absolutely secondary factor even when a social butchery of such proportions is generated.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/smartcity/ita-ecco-magagne-e-turbolenze-della-nuova-alitalia/ on Tue, 26 Jan 2021 09:53:29 +0000.