aviation
Alitalia is over: Italy’s new airline Ita is launched
It’s over for the airline Alitalia. Photo: Jack Guez / AFP / dpa
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After 74 years, Italy’s airline Alitalia is over. The successor Ita will start on Friday. But turbulence could threaten the new airline.
After the end for the traditional Italian airline Alitalia, the new Italia Trasporto Aereo (Ita) is now starting operations. According to flight portals, the first Ita machine took off at 6:13 a.m. from Milan Linate Airport in the direction of Bari.
The state-owned airline says it plans to operate 191 flights on the first day. 24 of them are national, 56 international. Frankfurt and Munich would also be served from Rome. “Born in 2021” (Born in 2021) – this “celebratory” lettering is worn among other things by one of the planes, as Ita called it.
Alitalia has been in crisis for years
The last Alitalia flight landed late Thursday evening, according to the airport, at 11:23 p.m. in Rome. The airline had been in a crisis for years. In 2017, the state had to step in when the company went bankrupt. Hundreds of millions of euros in aid could not save the airline, which is considered symbolic of Italy.
The conditions for the establishment of the Ita were agreed with the EU. It is considered to be the successor to Alitalia, but according to the EU Commission it is not its economic successor.
The new airline plans to operate with 52 planes and a workforce of around 2,800 this year. Tickets have been available on a provisional website since August. The company wants to focus on business and leisure customers.
In the coming years, the fleet is expected to grow, so that Ita will be flying 105 planes in 2025 and employing up to 5700 people. At its hubs in Rome-Fiumicino and Milan-Linate, however, it had to surrender parts of the old Alitalia’s take-off and landing rights.
Criticism from the union
Some are critical of the start. The Cub Trasporti union wants to gather on Friday at the capital’s Fiumicino airport for a demonstration on the occasion of the Ita launch, as Cub secretary Antonio Amoroso told the foreign press in Rome on Thursday. The company’s plan has no perspective. It is unclear how Ita intends to use the aircraft it has bought without essential market shares. The union expects heavy economic losses in the next two years.
In recent years, Alitalia has come under pressure from low-cost airlines on the Italian and European markets, as aviation expert Ugo Arrigo described in a presentation. Ita faces the same problem. On the long-haul route, the airline is also weakly positioned with only seven instead of 26 aircraft like Alitalia. Arrigo concluded that Alitalia was the Italian airline that no longer existed and Ita was the one that would no longer exist.