The point of the article was not to analyze the specific reasons for the failure of Bonza, but to look at the failure of airline deregulation to achieve competition and the broader failure of neoliberal market reform. But lots of commenters in the Guardian apparently read the headline and nothing else, offering a variety of nitpicking comments. If you want to comment, stick to the main point and avoid snark.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the short-haul airline business is going to be disrupted in the next five years by the arrival of >200 km 20--30 seater electric planes. We know they will be very quiet and very cheap to run. The one big uncertainty is when the batteries will be good enough. Last year CATL announced a new design with "up to" 500Wh/kg energy density (https://www.catl.com/en/news/6015.html ). Their target market is not niche long-range cars and trucks, but planes. Small towns everywhere will rush to build simple retro airstrips – a short runway, a hut, and a very fast charger. The big problem will be finding landing slots at the big hub airports, but quiet planes can fly more at night.
The Australian situation is a weird outlier. My home airport is Malaga, the fourth busiest in Spain, with 144,000 flights in 2022 (vs. Melbourne 217,000). It is served by 49 mainly European airlines; to the UK alone, they include EasyJet, Ryanair, British Airways/Iberia, Jet2, TUI, Vueling. and Wizz Air. Brexit and the opening of a high-speed rail line to Madrid have hardly made a dent. Carbon emissions and noise are real problems. Lack of competition is not. It helps that the competition piece of the European Commission seems to have inherited the hard-nosed ethos of the postwar German cartel office.
En passant, I wonder what neoliberalism has to do with a clear case of regulatory capture by an incumbent monopoly. Hammurabi may well have known the problem of conservative rich men protecting wealth, privilege and hierarchy by political lobbying, hired propagandists and soft or hard bribery. The Cauliflower Trust is not usefully approached through the lens of neoliberalism. I hope John Q will not join my fellow commentator Ikonoclast, the resident curmudgeon at the other site, and the better-known activist journalist George Monbiot, in stretching the term to include all the perennial evils of capitalism.
Partial retraction: in the case in point, I take JQ's word for it that the Australian policymakers who allowed this particular avatar of the Sumerian Cauliflower Trust to have its way were neoliberals in the narrow Friedman/Hayek/Washington Consensus sense. I leave it to others to judge whether their behaviour is best described as learned helplessness, or a simpler inability to see the pervasive failures of actual markets so obvious to Adam Smith - see the famous gorilla suit experiment popularised by Daniel Kahneman.
The point of the article was not to analyze the specific reasons for the failure of Bonza, but to look at the failure of airline deregulation to achieve competition and the broader failure of neoliberal market reform. But lots of commenters in the Guardian apparently read the headline and nothing else, offering a variety of nitpicking comments. If you want to comment, stick to the main point and avoid snark.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the short-haul airline business is going to be disrupted in the next five years by the arrival of >200 km 20--30 seater electric planes. We know they will be very quiet and very cheap to run. The one big uncertainty is when the batteries will be good enough. Last year CATL announced a new design with "up to" 500Wh/kg energy density (https://www.catl.com/en/news/6015.html ). Their target market is not niche long-range cars and trucks, but planes. Small towns everywhere will rush to build simple retro airstrips – a short runway, a hut, and a very fast charger. The big problem will be finding landing slots at the big hub airports, but quiet planes can fly more at night.
Is ."renationalisation" such a difficult word?
I was asked this question at a recent Senate committee hearing. My view is that renationalising airports should come first.
The Australian situation is a weird outlier. My home airport is Malaga, the fourth busiest in Spain, with 144,000 flights in 2022 (vs. Melbourne 217,000). It is served by 49 mainly European airlines; to the UK alone, they include EasyJet, Ryanair, British Airways/Iberia, Jet2, TUI, Vueling. and Wizz Air. Brexit and the opening of a high-speed rail line to Madrid have hardly made a dent. Carbon emissions and noise are real problems. Lack of competition is not. It helps that the competition piece of the European Commission seems to have inherited the hard-nosed ethos of the postwar German cartel office.
En passant, I wonder what neoliberalism has to do with a clear case of regulatory capture by an incumbent monopoly. Hammurabi may well have known the problem of conservative rich men protecting wealth, privilege and hierarchy by political lobbying, hired propagandists and soft or hard bribery. The Cauliflower Trust is not usefully approached through the lens of neoliberalism. I hope John Q will not join my fellow commentator Ikonoclast, the resident curmudgeon at the other site, and the better-known activist journalist George Monbiot, in stretching the term to include all the perennial evils of capitalism.
Partial retraction: in the case in point, I take JQ's word for it that the Australian policymakers who allowed this particular avatar of the Sumerian Cauliflower Trust to have its way were neoliberals in the narrow Friedman/Hayek/Washington Consensus sense. I leave it to others to judge whether their behaviour is best described as learned helplessness, or a simpler inability to see the pervasive failures of actual markets so obvious to Adam Smith - see the famous gorilla suit experiment popularised by Daniel Kahneman.