by Jesper M. Bentzen/ Scifi.dk
The airlines are taking about potential income loss, but is it actual loss all of it? Granted there was no income, but the expenses are not the same as when operating normally. How much do you think they saved by not using any fuel for 6 days? They don’t have to buy food or drinks for passengers either. No cleaning needed since the planes are not used.
I don’t know if they had to pay all staff full pay – they could have been given forced leave, or an opportunity to use their overtime flex or holidays. There is no wear and tear on airplanes that are grounded. The maintenance crew could get time to inspect and maintain some places that are otherwise very difficult to take offline in a busy airport, and the planes could get a major inspection that would otherwise not be possible. All in all it is not all bad news for the airlines and airports.
Despite this now they want the tax payers to pick up the bill for their loses (whatever the real loses are). I have had enough of all this tax payer fleecing. Nobody asked the people if they wanted to bail out the banks, and now it is the airlines. If they can’t survive in our economy due to a 6 days grounding for the first time in history (as far as I know) then let them fail.
Increase the prices and spread your losses out on the customers as all other businesses do – it is only 6 days out of 365, so a 1.6% increase should more than cover it especially given that they didn’t have all the usual expenses, but they did have extra costs for hotels (they ones that were that lucky), but even if they were to raise the prices to 3% would that really be such a big deal – would it keep people from traveling? I don’t think so, and they could still end up earning more than they would have done otherwise.
Stop all this fear based bail outs. Of course the bank bail outs are the real scandal – they make risky speculations if not down right misleading investors, and when it goes wrong they get bonuses and saved. The greed in the financial sector is a blood sucking leech on our economy, and we are expected to just accept that the irresponsible people that deliberately swindled to gain profit get rewarded because we are afraid that they are too big to fail. No, let the banks fail, and bail out the innocent people if needed, but don’t reward the criminals!
