Gloomy weekend for the airline industry

It's been a horror week for the airline industry. This article by William Lyons in the Scotsman is best summary of the Zoom debacle, I have found so far - three things immediately strike me:

• The lack of management knowledge - one of the brother CEOs said on Radio Fivelive on Friday night at 22:30 - Zoom had less than 10,000 bookings outstanding - it appears the number was 60,000.....mmmh one wonders if the lack of management information may have been one of the issues...........
• the nervousness of the airline industry..... like the Financial markets ........ as soon as there was a sniff of an issue, all the creditors piled in led by the British CAA, so quickly that filing for bankruptcy under the generous US/Canadian laws was not quick enough cover to keep up operations.
• the confusion around refunds, passengers in transit have had to spend 1000s to get home and there seems to be inconsistency amongst those with bookings about how they get their money back - Visa people seem ok but Amex not - some people seem to able to use ATOL bond arrangements, others not i their rebooking.. Given it is likely that other airlines will go under, it would be good to see some sort of regulator step and produce clear rules to protect passengers.

Meanwhile in Italy basket case Alitalia has gone under the statistics are stark:
It was losing $3 million a day, its net debt at the end of July amounted to $1.73 billion. The figure does not include a $442-million loan that the Italian government granted in April to keep the airline flying, that is still under investigation. It appears friends of the Prime Minister Silvio are going to step in and take up the "profitable bits" - sounds like a typically Italian Solution
Air France/KLM must be really glad they weren't bullied into a JV earlier in the year.

Plane safety - rational approach

Simon Calder spot on again

Weetabix

Having said I would not blog about trains - Hull Trains finally get a mention. On the red-eye from Hull (well.....the first train anyway), we pulled into Kings Cross 19 minutes early, which bought the following PA comment from the train manager:
"ladies & gentleman, we are arriving into Kings X, we are 19 minutes early due to the fact your driver Kevin had 3 Weetabix instead of 2 this morning.

.....I didn't have the heart to ask why they couldn't do it all the time ?

Lack of Blogs again

Sorry for the lack of blogs over the last 7 weeks but there have been some major upheavals in my life, none of which I can publish yet, but it will set up a whole new set of blogging possibilities.
Actually I have done comparatively few flights in the last few weeks, travelling mainly around UK on the train, which has not inspired me to write in my blog.