Ok, so the U.S. has given bail out money to Greece and who knows what other countries by now. Now this Volcano is going off in Iceland and the whole of Europe’s airline industry is caught up in this event. And so now “the states”, meaning Goldman Sachs or the Fed. Reserve directly, again, asked to intervene:
"“There will come a time when the scale is just too big,” he said, warning of “an implosion in the civil aviation industry” if flights across Europe continued to be grounded for two months or more.
Unless the states … come in and bail these companies out, there won’t be many carriers left…“”
And this also gives me an excuse to put this picture in here:
Airlines will get “subsidies”, “compensation” or whatever it’s called these days. How much is still unclear but one billion euro is probably a good guess. All to be forked by taxpayers who, just like me, haven’t boarded an airplane in years.
Two curious things though. First, on Saturday night, when air traffic was supposed to be shut down, I heard the customary freight planes passing over my house. Most of these planes are Russian-made and have a very distinctive engine pitch which is difficult to miss. Second: Rolls-Royce and British Airways flew a Trent-engined 747-400 through the thickest of the cloud last week. Right now R-R technicians and engineers at Hucknall are analyzing every single component of the four mighty Trent to look for signs of increased wear. R-R and BA are splitting the costs of the operation, which was carried out to see if the precaution was justified or it was just another case of running to the hills for no reason.
