Dialogue: It's time airlines quit taking us for a ride

By JOHN ROUGHAN

When I was a kid we lived within a bike ride of Christchurch Airport and sometimes I went there just to watch the planes. It was early in the 1960s. Jet travel was beginning. Watching the airliners was like a vision of the future.

Everybody believed then that by the time I grew up we would be going everywhere by air. It would be cheap, commonplace; we would think no more about it than catching a bus.

Those were dreamy days. People also imagined that one day computers would become compact and cheap enough to be installed in households. And there was an absurd character on television with a wireless telephone no bigger than his shoe.

Even then, books were contemplating a "global village" in which telecommunications could be transmitted at the speed of light and aircraft, hovercraft, even space craft, would be the standard means of human travel by the turn of the century.

All of it has happened except the last. Air travel, for some reason, has never grown up. We still have to book, queue and pay a small fortune to fly anywhere at short notice, particularly within the country.

We have to shop around for affordable holidays, book well in advance for concessions, accept nonsense such as non-refundable fares and ridiculously early reporting times.

Commercial aircraft have grown larger but no faster. Supersonic travel, another of those expectations of the early jet age, has not advanced on Concorde, now a 30-year-old dying swan.

Most of us still approach an international flight with an excitement, or fear, that ought to have disappeared in familiarity decades ago. Airlines happily feed the excitement by providing needless services and excessive attention. Their great fear has always been the carrier who will provide all we really ask of a transport service - a safe vehicle, a competent driver and a comfortable seat - at its true price.

At least, I think that is what most people would prefer. It is possible that, given a choice, there would be sufficient customers prepared to pay a premium to keep full-service airlines in business. We may soon find out.

Air travel worldwide may be about to become an industry shaped at last by consumers rather than governments. There is not much argument about the reasons for commercial aviation's failure to develop normally.

Left alone, the most sophisticated technology will rapidly get better and cheaper as demand grows. It is scarcely 10 years since personal computers took off, and not 20 years since cellphones appeared. In each case the prices have come down as steadily as their capacity and quality has improved.

Airlines have never been left alone. Theirs has been a jealously protected national industry since its inception. Even when most countries privatised their airlines, regulations persisted which favoured "flag-carriers" for reciprocal landing rights.

Despite "open skies" within the United States since 1978 and the European Community since 1997, no-frills airlines have had to operate out of secondary airports and survive on charters. But slowly, remorselessly, change is coming. Recent experience in New Zealand - right up to this week's bid for Air New Zealand - is an echo of developments worldwide.

Competition to the flag-carriers usually came in the form of another full-service operator bidding up the quality rather than lowering the price. Intruders who threatened to devalue the product were quickly dispatched by predatory pricing.

Many found it safer to run feeder services for the big airlines, which were themselves forming alliances and consolidating for regional dominance.

Air NZ is not alone in biting off more than it can chew with Ansett Australia, and facing take-over by Qantas or Singapore Airlines. This week's Economist reports that Lufthansa is in trouble and Swissair is struggling to survive, having taken over a lemon, Belgium's Sabena. Italy's carrier, Alitalia, is trying to attach itself to Air France for survival.

In Europe, too, low-fare operators are beginning to spread their wings beyond charters. Witness the overtures of Virgin when Air NZ's internal rival collapsed. The response of Transport Minister Mark Gosche was not exactly nimble.

When he learned that Virgin wanted to fly transtasman as well as the main trunk, he wanted reciprocal rights for Air NZ at Heathrow. Virgin is not that sort of girl.

No doubt Mr Gosche has been swotting up on the airline industry since then. So, I imagine, have the Prime Minister and others. Air NZ is likely to present them with questions that will test their foresight and fortitude.

Will it protect a national carrier at any cost? Or will it read the trend and keep its nerve?

In Air NZ's present predicament, with fearful capital requirements over the next few years, the Qantas-Singapore-Brierley proposal this week cannot be dismissed. If it spells the end of Air New Zealand as an international presence, would it matter?

The cabinet needs to decide dispassionately where it thinks the international airline industry is going. If it believes that, despite open skies and privatisation, the international market will forever be rigged for national carriers, then New Zealand may need to keep one.

If, however, its members read the oracles, they might conclude that airlines are becoming multinationals and that our tourism cannot forever depend on a flagged airline to lead its promotion.

It would be sad to see the koru go, but the industries that serve us best are not static. When airlines lose their national pretensions and have to compete to serve everyone, the jet age will be cleared for take-off.