Wings of Change Downfall of Alitalia/Finnair Is 98

Now Alitalia is gone. As you join us today a 74-year saga of the airline business is now gone, maybe forever joining a very long list of airlines that some of us grew up with and thought might never go away.

We do not pretend to to know all that much about Alitalia. But we know someone who does and shares his observations here.

Marco Sorgetti, the recently retired Director General of FIATA and, for our money, the greatest DG to serve that iconic nearly 95-year old Geneva-based forwarder organization, today is alive and well in Turin, Italy.

Here he tells the story from up close and personal of AZ. 

We recall delivering our newspaper, the original Air Cargo News founded in USA in 1975, 8 years before some Brits knowingly swiped our name and started up the now German-owned Air Cargo News in London.

We came across some cargo workers at one stop, who were living in a container outside Hangar 6 at JFK where AZ Cargo operated. As AZ employees, they were on strike for what seemed like years back in the 1990s. Eventually after a couple of years the strike was settled and everyone knew the trouble with AZ was, that no one ever lost their job or something along those lines. 

"Now," Marco writes, "with Alitalia gone I wonder if the Italian style that lived so high in the air might be part of the story? 

"Maybe too much of La Dolce Vita?. 

"Perhaps," says Marco. "Geoffrey is not far from truth, but the picture is far more complicated."

If you wish to continue listening you will get an idea of what we are talking about.

Finnair is 98

In 1939, Finnair was on display at The New York World's Fair promoting planned scheduled services from Helsinki to New York
City for 1940 via four-engined, high-flying Focke-Wulf 200 Condor passenger aircraft.
In 1938, an FW-200 flew nonstop from Berlin to New York City scaring the hell out of Pan Am, which operated big lumbering Boeing B314 flying boats across the pond.
Minus the world at war, Finnair would have been flying non-stop, HEL-LGA in 1940!
So happy birthday Finnair and heartfelt thanks for the memories.