Airlines: December 2008 Archives

Rather like the epic Aeroflot saga fought out between governments hand in hand with Boeing and Airbus, the ongoing THY Turkish Airlines contest is turning out to have a predictably long-drawn-out final scene.

Today Flight's extremely well-informed Turkish correspondent Tolga Ozbek reports that the decision, due to have been made before the end of the year, has been postponed to mid-January at the request of the bidders. Seems the talking is not yet over.

American is famously still the only one of the US majors not to have resorted to Chapter 11 to sort out its problems over the years, and analysts have always had mixed views as to whether that was smart or not.

I've been struck by two things about it: the detectable pride that many in the company take in that record, but also the continuously abrasive labour relations that seem to be a fact of life at American. How management there has the stamina for it I don't know. (I wrote about this before.)

Nevertheless, CEO Gerard Arpey has never expressed any regrets about the strategy and he's just taken the chance to not do so again in a speech at a Dallas Business Journal event carried in full at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram's Sky Talk blog.