Malév Hungarian Airlines

» see malev.hu as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Malév began on 29 March 1946 as Maszovlet, short for Hungarian-Soviet Civil Air Transport Joint Stock Company, and the name was honest about the arrangement: half the shares sat in Moscow. Hungary bought the Soviet half out in 1954 and the airline took the name Malév. For four decades after that it flew Ilyushins and Tupolevs out of Budapest Ferihegy on the closed side of Europe, and when the border opened it became the ordinary thing a mid-sized flag carrier becomes, a Boeing operator running a transfer hub.

The ownership record is where the story actually sits. The Hungarian state privatization agency held 99.5 percent of the airline until February 2007, when a company called AirBridge Zrt bought 99.9 percent of it. Vnesheconombank, the Russian state development bank, took 49 percent in March 2009 as security against a loan. By February 2010 the government had bought the whole thing back and held 95 percent of a company it had sold three years before. Every one of those transactions came with public money attached to it.

On 9 January 2012 the European Commission ruled that the money had been illegal. Capital injections and loan guarantees that no commercial investor would have offered had gone into Malév between 2007 and 2010, and the Commission ordered them repaid: 38 billion forints, about 130 million euros. Anyone who could read a balance sheet understood what that meant on the day it was published.

~ the record ~

~ the last morning ~

Malév stopped flying at six in the morning on 3 February 2012, not quite 66 years after it started and four weeks after the ruling. Twenty-two aircraft were on the ground by the end of the day. The February schedule it never operated had 329 weekly flights to 42 destinations and more than 35,000 weekly seats, which came to 39 percent of all international capacity out of the Hungarian capital.

The Metropolitan Court of Budapest declared the airline insolvent on 14 February. Liquidation then ran until April 2018, six more years of lawyers working through a company that had not owned a flying airplane since the first week of February 2012.

~ the istanbul thread ~

Searching a dead carrier against a country turns up what the main article leaves out, and for Turkey what it turns up is Malév Flight 203. On 21 September 1977 a Tupolev Tu-134 left Istanbul for Budapest with a stop scheduled in Bucharest. The crew had set the barometric altimeters wrong and the aircraft came in far below its cleared altitude. It hit treetops and went into a ditch near Urziceni. Twenty-nine of the 53 people aboard died.

That flight is the extent of the airline's reach into where I live. In 2012 I was 28 and writing software in Ankara, and a Hungarian flag carrier failing in a Brussels competition ruling was a wire story on a Friday. The carrier that mattered here was Turkish Airlines, which spent exactly the years of Malév's decline turning itself into one of the largest networks in the world.

~ who took the slots ~

Forty percent of Budapest airport's 8.9 million annual passengers and about half its revenue disappeared in one morning, and the low-cost carriers moved the same day. Wizz Air and Ryanair between them announced more than forty new routes on 3 February. Ryanair had a four-aircraft Budapest base open inside a week and five aircraft inside two months.

It mostly worked. Point-to-point traffic was 60 percent recovered six days after the collapse and 80 percent recovered within six months, and the airport closed 2012 at 8.5 million passengers against a lowered forecast of 7.8 million. What never came back was the transfer traffic, 1.5 million people a year who had been changing planes in Budapest because Malév gave them a reason to stop there. Terminal 1 closed at the end of May 2012, because point-to-point airlines had no use for it.

~ the anniversary ~

Malév joined oneworld on 29 March 2007, its 61st birthday to the day. It was out of the alliance and out of business four years and ten months later. The airport it flew from stopped being called Ferihegy in 2011 and lost its flag carrier in 2012, in that order.

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