It's Macau and its government who should be embarrassed - four years of trying and still nothing credible has emerged in terms of air service support for the new Macau economy. Its almost as if they want HKG or Zhuhai to take up the slack. Roll on those new ferries from the Venetian and we'll see if it can be done.
CNAC is the prime culprit in all of this in pushing something forward without any coherent plan. Air China then gets more directly involved and asks more sensible questions about where cost advantages are coming from versus incumbents and CNAC (and their third attempt at a management team) has no answer.
Air China doesn't really care anyway, as long as no one else can move into the space. They're too busy dreaming of intergalactic domination to bother with trivial stuff like Macau. Plus the politics of their Taiwan obsession means that controlling a dull aviation environment is more important than anything else.
Throw in an NX senior management desperate to prevent even the mildest of performance comparisons in their own backyard and we have all the ingredients of the current mess. Forced to put money they don't have into an airline they don't want, no doubt NX will now do its best to make a "dual airline" strategy impossible...
Shun Tak is also getting some lessons in minority shareholding...at least Virgin Blue saw the writing on the wall with the CNAC gang and wisely cut their losses earlier in the process. Pansy better stick to monopolies in future...