Yup, that is no joke. Airlines are begging taxpayers to bail them out because of the weather. This would have been unthinkable several decades ago. But because governments are establishing and encouraging industrial begging and victimisation by bailouts, it’s not surprising:
As airline losses from the volcanic ash cloud spiraled over $1 billion on Monday, the industry demanded EU compensation and criticized European governments for not using scientific measures to evaluate the ash and open up their airspace.
With every bailout, additional begging hands will spring up. It will incentivise industry responding to problems by milking them for their bailout pottential rather than acting quickly, decisively and in a way that minimises losses. After all, the greater the losses, the greater the bailout.
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The numbers in the losses just make no sense to me. If the planes are grounded, then there’s no fuel cost. We shouldn’t need air traffic controlers, so they can take the month off. And the people who check you in, fight attendants, security personnel, pilots – they can all just take a month off! But the airlines are prolly acting like their government instead of their employer, and they are prolly keeping them on payroll. They could lock the doors and turn off the lights at the airports in Europe, but I’m sure that’s not what’s going on. No, there shouldn’t really be a loss at all. Loss in profit, perhaps, but that happens sometimes. I guess I just don’t get it.
Good points. All of them.
Tank, it’s a law in the UK that employees are to be paid if they show up for work, even if they are sent home (if they choose to go home on their own free will, they don’t get the money). The airlines are also losing money because they are refunding the tickets for the ‘lost’ flights…not to mention the possible addition of man hours for customer service to handle phone calls, irate flyers coming in, etc. Yeah, I think that number of $1B may be a bit high, but there are a lot of airlines and flights in the affected areas.
Honestly, it makes sense to me that salaried employees would be paid through the outage, or a renegotiation should take place. Hourly employees should be looking for alternative employment immediately. This eruption may last years, and airlines should be looking to adjust for cost minimalization. The most obvious way to adjust would be to increase the cost of flights they CAN make, and to make many more flights where the ash isn’t a problem.