"The French state injected about 20 billion francs (3.05 billion euros, 3.54 billion dollars) in Air France subsidies between 1994 and 1997."
"The recent reported statement by the chairman of Alitalia claiming that government help is needed to prevent the bankruptcy of the Italian flag carrier." (Again??)
"1996, under the eagle eye of Commissioner Kinnock, Iberia received state aid of £460 million and that was approved under the market economy investor principle. We shall see how that works out. In other words, the flag carriers of six European Union member states out of 15 have between them received £6.364 billion of state aid over the past five years. Forty per cent. of EU states have received that grotesquely large amount of state subsidy--and some, such as Air France and Iberia, have repeatedly come back for more."
"On Wednesday, Ms de Palacio announced a limited package that would allow European governments to help airlines, after the 11 September attacks pushed the crisis-bound industry into turmoil."
Should I go on?
Yes, that sentence came out a bit backwards. What I meant by travelpatterns, is that a lot more europeans travel to the states than vice versa. People in the US seem to fly more domestically. While that is certainly no ones fault, that is just how it is and as such, I cannot see why open skies would be advantageous to US airlines, just like opening LHR would be disadvantageous to BA.
SAS, can because of their network, profitably serve the US, but only by pulling people from all over Scandiland and to a limited extent EU. But, in the reverse, no US carrier serves CPH, because there simply is not enough americans going there. Sure, a american carrier could, after open skies, set up the same network, but I doubt it will happen, since US carriers are more concerned about domestic ops.
(In case of Star, from what I can see, Lufty and UAL are the big dogs)
As much as this pain you, there are a lot more people wanting to visit the states, than visit EU. Europeans tend to travel on EU airlines and to a limited extent, prefer their own national brand.
Again I must ask, because I never get an answer, why should US airlines push for open skies? The fact that I canot seem to get a response to that, tells me, that EU airlines has lots to gain and US most to lose.
Last edited by Diesel8; 16th Jun 2004 at 16:08.