around 65% of the home market is going to put qf out of business? interesting economics, wouldn't you agree. sq competes already on many sectors out of oz. result some 7/8% of the outbound / inbound market, i think that says it all for your comment customers want sq.
read this little beauty. this should help you sleep well tonight.
Free Flow: An airline deregulator has second thoughts
By Don Phillips International Herald Tribune
The U.S. Congress would have killed airline deregulation a quarter-century ago if lawmakers had known the effect it would have on employees, taxpayers and smaller cities, according to a man who helped make the bill into law.
Tom Allison, then the chief counsel to the Senate Commerce Committee, said the movement to allow open competition and remove restrictions on where airlines could fly, now spreading through Europe and Asia, would prove to be the right move over time. But it has produced so much disruption and expense, he said, that no member of Congress would have dared vote for it back in 1980 if they had had a clear view of the future. And he said he wished Congress had added significant human and financial protections to the law.
Allison, now a semiretired attorney living in Seattle, contacted the International Herald Tribune after reading a Free Flow column about Jeffrey Shane, a top Transportation Department official who is shepherding a series of regulatory changes designed to open U.S. and European skies to much greater airline competition. At the same time, European airlines would be allowed to invest significantly in U.S. airlines without some of the current restrictions.
Allison and Shane worked together on the U.S. deregulation bill in 1979 and 1980, shortly after Allison left his position as a Senate staff member to take up a job in President Jimmy Carter's administration as general counsel for the Transportation Department. Shane was then assistant general counsel for international affairs.
Allison said that he had a great deal of respect for Shane and that they both worked hard in 1979 and 1980 to shepherd deregulation through Congress, but he said, "I don't think Congress would have passed deregulation if they had known what would happen."
The public now sees the effects mainly as lower airfares between big cities, but it fails to understand some of the serious human and other costs of deregulation, he said.
"I had no idea these things would occur," Allison said.
Airline employees in particular have suffered because of deregulation, he said. In many cases, salaries have been cut and retirement benefits slashed, he said, and unemployment has risen in the industry even as the frequency of service increases.
Passengers may think they received a bargain with deregulation, and fares have stayed relatively low on many routes between major cities around the world, he said. But many small cities have lost air service entirely, and the cost of flying to medium-size cities is much higher than it used to be, he said.
"It's cheaper to fly to Paris than to Missoula," Montana, he said.
Despite all the freedom, airlines are also in terrible financial condition, and many are in bankruptcy or just emerging from bankruptcy, he said. At the same time, passengers suffer from a loss of service quality, he added.
"It's not as nice as it used to be," he said.
One thing that many people overlook, including politicians, is the massive shift of airline pension debt to the public, he said. Years ago, the United States set up the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation to guarantee that pensions would be paid even if a company went bankrupt or went out of business.
The original expectation was that this government body would pay out a relatively small amount of money and that a lot of that money would be made up by seizing the assets of bankrupt companies.
But apparently, no one counted on the dumping of billions of dollars in pension obligations by major transportation companies. U.S. transportation companies may go bankrupt under Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy law, which does not result in a shutdown but instead protects the company from creditors while the company reorganizes. Thus, transportation company pensions may be dumped on the government with no real way to recoup federal costs.
"A private cost is shifted to a public cost," he said.
Allison said he would never go back to the days of strict regulation, but if he could do it over he would add more safeguards for workers and the public.
"I don't think you could go back," he said. "Once you scramble the egg, it's scrambled."