Hi there
I did work on such a coop airline 10 years ago.
We went up to the stage of getting a tax refund of 14 Million Euros on two A340 transaction.
The idea was very welcomed by some high Government managers just because it was of common sense.
Employees of a productive outfit were sharing the benefits of the result of their own work and assets were rent to investors in competition.
In fact, money goes to work and not to money a real mean to help the consumation society working good.
No socialism or communism either in this kind of Company only workers working together and sharing together good or bad things.
This kind of outfit is able to work on a breakeven budget if necessary and to lower its costs during hard times very easily.
The only and main problem today is where and on witch kind of network it can work.
The low cost sector is owned by financials able to make a massive order of hauls and make money on this only deal of assets.
The classic long haul is saturated.
The only remaining market is tour operating if you are able to convince them to compete on something else than transportation.
Maybe you can make a refund chamber for a compensation comensurate with the number of seats generated.
Sorry guys for my writen English as not my mother language.
Anyway good to see such idea is back as I still believe its the ultimate solution for everybody workers and financials.
Concerning the answer to why we did not do it is that our competitor who still makes money on the network we were looking for took our business plan and started with A330's as we had to wait for 2 years for the A340-600.
There was no way to start the business on a smaller aircraft as it was not fitting to our BP and no way to start after this competitor.
And one very important point. The owners had the same amount of shares in the business witch was owned not only by pilots but by all the employees. The number of managers was the minimum and a lot of things subcontracted.
This was a way to make a difference between the salary to compensate a responsability and share to compensate equally the benefits of the Entity called Airline.
DDay mates and good luck
