Alitalia

» see alitalia.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The last Alitalia flight was AZ1586, an Airbus A320 out of Cagliari, and it touched down at Rome Fiumicino just after eleven at night on 14 October 2021. It was running late. The airline had published the closing date back on 24 August and had already stopped selling tickets, so nobody on board was finding out at the gate. Operations ended formally the next morning, when ITA Airways started flying the same routes out of the same airport.

Alitalia was established on 16 September 1946 with a capital of 900 million lire and a name that folded ali and Italia into one word. It flew for the first time on 5 May 1947 and absorbed its domestic rival LAI in 1957, after which it was simply the Italian airline. The state owned it outright until 2009. From Paul VI in 1964 until the year the company closed, every Pope who traveled abroad left Rome on a chartered Alitalia jet.

The money is the part worth stating plainly. Across its life the Italian government is estimated to have put around thirteen billion euros into the company, and the European Commission spent years ruling that chunks of this were illegal state aid and ordering Italy to recover them, including two loans worth 900 million euros granted in 2017. What that spending bought was time rather than a business. By 2018 Alitalia was the twelfth-largest airline in Europe, which is a respectable size and a bad place to be sitting between Ryanair below it and Lufthansa above it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the flag on the tail ~

A flag carrier is a different object from an airline. It is a piece of national furniture that happens to fly, which is the reason governments keep paying for one long after the arithmetic has stopped working. Italy did this for seventy-five years and the Commission in Brussels spent the last twenty of them saying it was not allowed to.

I am writing this from a country that runs the same arrangement and has never had to bury it. Turkish Airlines was founded in 1933, is still nearly half owned by the state through the sovereign wealth fund, and spent the exact years Alitalia was dying pushing its network out of Istanbul until it reached more countries than any other carrier. Two state instruments from the same century, both held up on political grounds rather than commercial ones, and they came out of the 2010s at opposite ends. In 2019 Turkish Airlines carried 74.3 million passengers and Alitalia carried about 21 million.

~ four owners in thirteen years ~

The old company went bankrupt in 2008. A consortium of Italian investors called CAI bought the profitable pieces that December for around a billion euros, merged them with the equally bankrupt Air One, and Air France-KLM took a 25 percent stake for 322 million. The new Alitalia declined to honor the old Alitalia's obligations, which meant former staff lost their discounted tickets and passengers lost their claims.

Etihad bought 49 percent in 2014 and ran it for three years. In April 2017 the workforce voted down a package of job cuts, Etihad stopped funding it, and the company went into extraordinary administration in May. It stayed there. The Italian state took full ownership again in March 2020 and signed the decree creating a successor that October, which is how an airline in administration kept flying for four more years while the government built its replacement in public.

~ what ITA actually bought ~

The European Commission wrote to Italy in January 2021 arguing that the new carrier should not be allowed to use the Alitalia name, on the grounds that the brand is an unambiguous signal of continuity and continuity was the one thing the state aid rules forbade. Italy bought it anyway. ITA Airways paid 90 million euros for the trademark on 14 October 2021, the same day the last A320 came home from Cagliari.

ITA opened the following morning with fifty-two aircraft against a predecessor that had employed around ten thousand people, more than seven thousand of whom went onto a state layoff scheme instead of into the new company. Then in January 2025 Lufthansa finalized a 41 percent stake in it. Seventy-five years of Italian public money defending an Italian flag carrier, and the thing that finally stabilized the successor was a German one buying a large piece of it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »