EAM, you are dealing in absolute semantics. Same planes, same people (slightly less), same routes, same everything. This is done at a time where we are at the start of a huge downturn in our business cycle. It has no chance of legitimately succeeding. It is just taking them to the next, final, really final, oh maybe final last chance in a few years time.
Yes, they should be shut down, and as stated any vacuum will be filled. Initially by extra uplift into the legitimate hubs of Lufthansa, BA, Air France/KLM, etc. And in the end a new entity will be brought forward. What would I say if Air France/KLM or Lufthansa would go bankrupt, easy same thing. Is Alitalia special? No it is not. A lot more illustrious airlines have gone the way of the dodo bird. Airlines a lot bigger than Alitalia. The list is long, how about PanAm, TWA, Eastern (keep adding on to it at your own leisure). Companies like KLM (partially due to their fiasco with Alitalia, costing them 280 million Euros) and Northwest Airlines have lost or are about to lose their independence, an option sabotaged by the employees at Alitalia. These are hard choices, but they are the right ones if you pretend to compete in a capitalistic model. I would not care if this was happening in a vacuum, but it is not. This turd mangling is distorting the playing field, and harming the remaining legitimate players, and in the end putting a lot more jobs at risk than the 18,000 that would have gone if the life support would have been turned off at Alitalia. So this effects many participants on the pprune forums, even though they might think it does not.
Are you saying that the Alitalia employees have a greater right to a job, compared to the tens of thousands who are, or are about to be made redundant worldwide at airlines who are doing the hard things to survive?