Well, it's obviously a sad day and I do hope that the banks succeed in creating a successor airline which can rise from Swissair's ashes - not least because I did rather enjoy the chocolates they served on their flights... It's quite possibly a smart deal for the Swiss banks, so long as they can flip out of their position before too long. I don't think Osama Bin Laden needs to worry at all about his deposits...
But it's also a very important day for international aviation. The idea that each European country can afford to prop up a national flag carrier surely dies today. One of the contributors above wrote about the emotional importance of Swissair as an ambassador for its country - well, that's all very well, but few contries can afford ambassadors that lose hundreds of millions of dollars every year. Hopefully what this means is that large scale European airline mergers are finally a genuine possibility. BA/KLM may rise from the dead (and indeed BA/Swissair might also have some legs). In any case, British readers can feel some comfort in the prospect that, as the country in Europe with the most successful experience in managing airlines (BA, VS, even EZ - it's a pretty impressive group), the UK's stake in this industry may very well increase.
The second issue highlighted today is the global political position of Switzerland, which has resolutely hidden behind its mountains over the last 30 years in an attempt to pretend that a modern, functional European Community was not coalescing around it. Arguably, had Swissair been an EU airline, it would never have adopted its disastrous strategy of acquiring minority equity stakes in neighbouring countries' airlines in the first place. The situations are scarely comparable, but just as the Sept 11 tragedy has done much to rid Americans of the idea of their exceptionalism, the collapse of Swissair will cause many Swiss to wonder again about the advantages of standing alone.
[ 02 October 2001: Message edited by: J-Class ]