It is today, Oct. 14, 2021, the last chance to see Alitalia’s elegant livery fly over the national skies.
Flight AZ 1586 departing from Cagliari at 10:05 p.m. to Rome Fiumicino, will be the last takeoff of our national airline after 75 years of an honored and troubled career. Founded in 1946 by IRI and the British state-owned airline of the time under the name of ALII, in 1947 it changed its name to Alitalia – Aerolinee Italiane Internazionali with a fleet consisting of just 4 Fiat G12s and 1 Savoia-Marchetti 95, loaned by the Air Force. It is a success story that of the first decades of Alitalia’s life: a headquarters in an elegant area of the capital, the hub at the Rome-Ciampino airport, 37 aircraft in the fleet and about 3,000 employees after just 10 years from its birth, a true Italian excellence for which the Sorelle Fontana were inconvenienced to create the first uniforms (succeeded by the flair of Mila Schon, Balestra, Armani and Ferretti, to name a few). The hub moved to Rome Fiumicino, when the new airport opened in 1961, and 10 years later, with the purchase of the first Boeing 747, the company adopted the new logo with the stylized tricolor A shown on the tails of the aircraft. It is the birth of an icon, a brand that gains trust in a short time and contributes to the distinctive elegance of Made in Italy all over the world. A brand that today is worth a fortune and which our nation has to give up because of the continuous unwise administrations-and also because of union interventions-that have followed one another from the early 1990s, when the economic crisis arrived, to the present day. In attempts to turn the airline’s fortunes around, the CEOs who have passed the baton over the past 30 years count a series of failures: the purchase agreement by Air France, which backed out before signing, the joint venture with KLM with the shift of the hub to Milan-Malpensa (another failure), a series of recapitalizations that gave way to the privatization of the company (the founding of CAI, in which several Italian companies entered; the rescue attempt with the entry of Poste Italiane; the purchase of 49 percent of the shares by Etihad Airways) and finally the Cura Italia decree establishing the establishment of the company ITA-Italia Trasporto Aereo wholly owned by the Italian state and the handover from Alitalia of the management of domestic civil air transport from tomorrow, October 15, 2021, in an attempt to stop a hemorrhage that has cost the Italian state several billion. Business choices are not debatable, especially if the accounts do not add up and burden the taxpayers’ shoulders, but this is not a date we should be proud of. Today ends, on the one hand, an era of squandering and, on the other, a piece of history made up of luster, patriotic pride, elegance, excellence in technology and professionalism for which the pilots’ school has distinguished itself all over the world so … stand up, Gentlemen, before Alitalia! And take off your hats as the curtain falls.
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