Thursday, October 14, the Italian National Company was to operate its last flight, before allowing it to ITA, a public company owned by the Ministry of Economy and Finance.
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With last minute delay or cancellation, the flight AZ1586 was to land at Rome-Fiumicino Airport, Thursday, October 14, shortly after 23 hours. When it stopped on the tarmac and its passengers, parted one hour earlier from Cagliari (Sardinia), will come out of the plane, the Alitalia company, a flagship of Italian air transport, will have ceased to exist.
The next morning, at 6:30, an Airbus A319 chartered by Italia Trasporto Aereo (ITA), a public company owned by the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance, will leave Milanese Linate Airport in the direction of Rome, for the company’s first commercial flight. The aircraft will wear the colors of the national flag, but any reference to the identity of the old company will, it seems, absent. On the first images made public by ITA, Tuesday, October 12, the aircraft will only bring the mention “Born in 2021” (“born in 2021”), in green, white and red letters.
Alitalia has already experienced a thousand deaths and as many rebirths, but this time, nothing like this: the discontinuity between the two entities is at the heart of the new device, negotiated footing between the Italian state and the European Commission. To materialize this period change, the Alitalia brand itself has been put on sale, for the sum of 290 million euros. For the time being, no buyer presented, and ITA gave up buying the logo, judging the price too high.
Founded in September 1946 in Rome, Alitalia conducted its first flight (Turin-Rome-Catania) on May 5, 1947, and crossed the Atlantic for the first time in 1948, to Buenos Aires. After the heroic times, like Italy, she knew the euphoria of the “economic miracle”, before the era of difficulties. For three decades, the company has been immersed in a deep crisis.
“In Italy, air traffic has more than tripled in a quarter of a century: there were 53 million passengers in 1997, it was at 171 million in 2019. However, since the year 2000, and if the It is exception of 2002, where the company received several hundreds of millions of euros of KLM penalties [the Dutch company just waived its commitment to buy back the company], the company lost money each year ” , details the economist Andrea Giuricin, a specialist in air transport. With 11 billion euros of cumulative losses since the beginning of the century, Alitalia was condemned to live under infusion.
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