Naturally, now that previously-shut airports throughout the continent are gradually starting to resume operations, the sentiment of “Never again!” is taking hold as eyes are cast about in the search of people to blame. In such situations, the temptation becomes overwhelming to avoid having to point fingers by simply blaming a machine, in this case the computer simulation that supposedly was the sole basis for shutting down flight operations once the volcano-ash started to spread. Various aircraft that the European airlines sent up to test actual conditions – including one reportedly dispatched by British Airways with CEO Willie Walsh, a trained pilot himself, aboard – encountered no problems or damage, so that has to constitute conclusive evidence that the flight-bans were panicked overreactions.

Unfortunately, the situation is probably not so simple as that. The assessment of the safety of flights of gigantic airliners with hundreds of passengers aboard one can assume has to be done on the basis of rather broader margins-for-error. I think it’s the editorial-writers at Financial Times Deutschland who have a better view of what went wrong, as expressed in their recent editorial Air traffic: Chaos announced. That title alludes to the FTD’s assertion that, because volcanic ash respects no borders, the various national authorities should have realized long ago that much closer international coordination was necessary in order to deal adequately with whatever sort of phenomena that could come along to threaten it.

Whether it is really reasonable to expect such coordination to have been in place before the Eyjafjallajökull volcano blew its top a week ago, it is clear that the sort of coordination needed was certainly not in place to deal with that. National authorities closed their country’s airspace or limited the operation of their airports in a piecemeal fashion, without consulting their colleagues in other countries. EU transport ministers only got around to conferring – by video-conference, naturally – at the beginning of this week. And it’s not even the EU that is in the best position to take the lead in these matters: you would think that would rather be Eurocontrol (long name: the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation), headquartered in Brussels, and despite that with no explicit organizational connection with the EU, but, with 38 member-states, encompassing most European nations whether they are members of the EU or not.

That’s fine; but clearly neither Eurocontrol nor the EU was up to fulfilling the coordination function that was required to ensure that assessments of the best experts in vulcanology and flight-safety were made widely available and acted upon in a harmonized manner, to ensure that the skies were shut down when the risk of flying was really too great, but that they were also opened up again once the danger had passed. Now we get to see whether these transport ministers have learned any lesson from this experience; after all, Europe has plenty of volcanos on its periphery – not only in Iceland but also in Italy, for example – that could cause all of this mess to happen again.

                          

That is what Patrick Anspach, writing in the Belgian paper L’Echo, would also like to know (Do the Air-Mergers Make Any Sense?). We can know what Walsh means when he says “in the current economic environment,” at least: that mainly refers to the ever-climbing (until recently) price for jet fuel that is turning profit-making routes into loss-makers for airlines the world over. And a merger does seem to be a popular thing to do these days, as in the US Delta and Northwest as well as Continental and United have taken recent steps towards union or at least greater cooperation.

But does the latter strategy really produce a solution to the former problem? Or, as Anspach puts it, “is it really useful to throw yourself in to the arms of your neighbor when you are in free-fall?” He thinks not; greater size is not the answer to the current ailments seriously afflicting the airlines. Those “synergies”? They don’t add up to much when two airlines merge, other than getting rid of redundancies where the two companies were engaged in doing the same thing. For the already-announced Delta-Northwest merger, for example, that adds up to savings of only $1 billion, when the two airlines’ combined turnover amounts to some $35 billion. Is that enough of a savings to make the move worthwhile, i.e. to ensure that the combined company will have a greater chance of survival in Walsh’s “current economic environment”?

No, according to Anspach the way to endure rather lies in a company remaining flexible enough to adapt and change the way it has to change to succeed under the new conditions. After all, he reminds us, it wasn’t the dinosaurs that survived back in pre-history.

                          

Admittedly, Brost and Lamparter put spark to the powder of O’Leary’s combustible nature right off the bat, by informing him as they walk in his office door that they got to Dublin with a budget carrier – O’Leary beams “Ah, two new customers!” – only to add “but not Ryanair. Otherwise we would have been underway three days for a two-hour interview.” The airline chief’s response: “Bullshit! And how much did you pay? As little as you could have with us?”

LOW COSTS, OUT-OF-THE-WAY AIRPORTS

For all the theatrics, that’s probably a suitable thematic introduction to the entire get-together, for offering the lowest ticket-prices is of course what Ryanair is supposed to be all about. (Brost and Lamparter leaven the interview’s transcript with interwoven paragraphs of pure reportage, and in the first such paragraph they note the “Ryanair – the low fares airline” plaque hanging on the wall behind airline chief’s desk.) But it’s all a little more subtle than that: as O’Leary notes in the interview, “Any idiot can offer low prices today,” and indeed, it seems that more and more airlines, old and new, are doing just that. “The trick is low costs.”

Part of achieving that is Ryanair’s noted policy of shunning the bigger, established European airports for their smaller counterparts – “Hamburg-Lübeck” instead of Hamburg’s Fühlsbuttel airport, for example (Lübeck is about 100km away from Hamburg proper), or “Brussels-Charleroi” (50km removed) instead of Brussels’ Zaventem airport. These smaller airports attract Ryanair flights by demanding lower usage payments than do the more-established ones, and the interview predictably touches upon the European Union’s current campaign against these supposedly unfair “subsidies.” (Although, as O’Leary is quick to point out rightly, “Brussels is the fatherland of subsidies” – maybe they just get offended when it’s someone else’s “subsidies” and not their own.) O’Leary expresses his confidence that this whole silliness will be cut short by the European Court of Justice.

For what if it isn’t? “No one will fly from there!” No flights means no revenue from airport shops, from cars rented, from hotels lying in the vicinity – actually, of course, no reason to exist, at least as a civilian airport. And also no “glamor”; so far, the airports in Germany that Ryanair has made agreements to use have all insisted on handling “glamorous” international flights, rather than run-of-the-mill inter-German routes. So Ryanair so far does not offer the latter, although the evolution of EU airline de-regulation means that it certainly has the legal right to do so. Indeed, O’Leary gives the clear impression to these German journalists that the budget airline’s expansion in the routes and destinations it offers German customers has gone more slowly than preferred, due to difficulties in finding low-cost airports to work with. In any case, though, he makes it clear that his airline will never give up the fight and sign up with the main city airports: “the best thing that could happen to Munich is to blow up the airport ["Franz Josef Strauss"; super-expensive, in O'Leary's opinion] and build a rather smaller one there instead.”

NO LIMIT DOWNWARD FOR PRICES

All right then, it’s low costs that are essential to being able to offer lower prices; the other budget competitors springing up may offer them too, but they’re all losing money, O’Leary contends, while Ryanair is not. But how low can you go? All the way to zero, according to the Irishman. Indeed, he claims that Ryanair last year already sold a full 15% of its tickets “at a price of zero euros.” Within four or five years Ryanair expects to expand that proportion to a full half, and in fact O’Leary claims to reduce Ryanair ticket prices by 5% each year. And in ten years: everyone flies for free. How is that possible? Again, because money is to be earned elsewhere, from hotels, rental car agencies, airport shops, perhaps even from local governments happy to pay to gain a stream of cash-spending tourists and other travellers through their city, which these travellers might otherwise avoid (being at present shamefully unaware, for example, of the charms of the past-its-prime steel factory town that is Charleroi, Belgium).

One of Die Zeit’s men then tries to amend O’Leary’s “zero euros” price to “zero euros plus tax,” but that only launches the Irishman on a PG-rated rave against Eurocrats and their taxes. The gist of it is: What’s the point of an airport tax – are train travellers charged a train station tax?

Other points covered in the interview: Although the European airline industry has now seemingly entered a stage of consolidation, of merger-and-acquisition (as in the joining of Air France and KLM), Ryanair is uninterested in any of that. His airline continues to grow faster, with lower costs, than any other, O’Leary contends; a partner would only slow it down. Besides, the airline mergers you see hardly have as their point lowering costs, but rather lowering competition – which only leads to higher prices (specifically mentioning Air France-KLM here). And Ryanair is uninterested in trans-Atlantic flights, for the simple reason that its low-cost model depends on using one aircraft-type only, the Boeing 737 – and the Boeing 737 doesn’t have the range to fly to America. (So no trans-Atlantic flights unless passengers are willing to swim the last three hours, O’Leary decrees.) Finally, how does he see the European airline industry in five years (when, to repeat, Ryanair will be giving half of its tickets away)? There will be the Lufthansa family, the Air France family, the British Airways family – and Ryanair. No other budget carriers? “They will continue to lose money. And at some point they will all be gone.”

                          

I must confess that I already knew that Moulet’s case was not the only one of its kind, even when I wrote to these pages a few days ago to discuss it. That’s because the earlier article from Le Monde I referred to then also discussed another rather interesting case of a French citizen being summarily deported from the US, this time an 18-year-old French woman, Diane Rousseau-Vellones, whose offense was that she had performed a few hours of baby-sitting for her hosts during an earlier three-month visit to the States. Did she receive money for that baby-sitting? “I didn’t ask for anything, but they gave me a few dollars, not more than thirty, to thank me,” she “confessed” during an airport interrogation as she was trying to enter the country a second time, in California, for another visit to “discover the country and improve her English.” What she discovered was that performing paid work even such as that, as an “undocumented alien,” was a big no-no – back to France with you, mademoiselle, right away, and at your expense!

I didn’t discuss Mlle. Rousseau-Vellones last Tuesday, because my sole subject then was M. Moulet. Too bad, I realize, because it’s all pretty outrageous. (Rest assured that I have my own preferred ways – radically different, it must be said, and rather kinder – of dealing with 18-year-old Frenchwomen who are curious about America and want to practice their English.) But that’s my function, of course, to separate for you what I think is relevant at the time from what I think is not; and that’s also why I try to include the links to the original articles, too, so that those of you with the necessary language skills can look to see what else is there. (Except that, unfortunately, Le Figaro locks its content away behind a “paid” barrier after a day or two.)

Anyway, Mlle. Rousseau-Vellones, M. Moulet – and there’s plenty more, as Angélique Négroni’s “Frenchies” article in today’s Le Figaro makes clear. Like the (unnamed) French journalist, turned away at an American immigration checkpoint because he didn’t have the proper visa; whereas before a he would be able to buy such a visa right there on the spot, this time he was simply sent back where he had come from, and this gentleman is convinced, in his words, that “the fact of being French played a role in how I was treated.” (Strange, I thought French citizens ordinarily don’t need a visa to enter the US.) Or the other French journalist, also unnamed, who had the right documentation, but was taken away for prolonged questioning anyway since that documentation showed that he had born in Algeria. Or the experience of one Agnès Vignol, who made the mistake of trying to visit the US again after having succeeded nine years previously in gaining entry there without the proper visa. No such luck this time; she was detained at JFK airport, with her arms and legs chained, before being escorted by police to an airplane to take her back across the ocean. And then, in this separate article (“This country ruined my life!”), there is the tale of Frenchman Michaël Philippe, regretfully caught up in the American machinery only recently established to chase after suspected terrorists. This means of course that he was held at length almost completely incommunicado (only calls from his lawyer and the French embassy allowed) in a micro-cell, with the usual pressure just to go ahead and plead guilty (to something he hadn’t done, but no matter) to save himself and everybody all the trouble. In all, another interesting revelation (but by no means the only one of that sort) for those interested in what the “land of the free and home of the brave” is up to these days under the current administration.

LEAVE GALLIC SPIRIT AT THE DOOR

Négroni’s last paragraph covers the interesting reactions to all this of the French authorities, consisting mainly of an appeal to behave oneself and be patient. Ne pas faire de l’esprit gaulois, they advise: Leave your “Gallic spirit” at home. As the Moulet affair showed, they point out, it’s not such a good idea to try to faire une farce when entering the US.

Négroni herself has other ideas, however. “Are the French truly victims of harassment on the part of the American authorities?” she asks, and the varied anecdotes she gives in her article of just that sort of thing happening leaves little doubt of her answer. However, to calm things down a bit the Le Figaro editors also include this article (“France Is Not the Only One Aimed At”), whose author is only given by the initials “A-C. D.L.” This points out that other countries have it even worse – in particular Poland, and so the discussion makes a full circle to this earlier €S entry in which I indeed covered what the Poles have to put up with to (try to) travel to the US. (That subject is hot once again, since Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski is visiting the US, where he asked President Bush to abolish the Polish visa requirement. The President, however, reportedly deflected this request with the excuse that such questions were Congress’ responsibility.)

                          

In exchange for its graphical supplement, the Le Figaro treatment goes into rather less detail about the incident beyond the basic facts. These include that Moulet is a student out of the Bouches-du-Rhône prefecture. (That’s in the south of France; “still a student at age 27?!” you might exclaim, to which the reply would be “Oh yes, that’s by no means uncommon. And German students tend to plunge into the ‘real world’ from academia at an even later stage.”) He was on his way back to France from a winter vacation in the Dominican Republic, on an American Airlines flight by way of JFK airport in New York City, when his somewhat-excessive stay in one of the airplane’s toilets prompted inquiries from a stewardess. Perhaps that simply annoyed him; in any case, in his response he started using the unforgivable “b-word.” (I’ll give you a hint: it has four letters in all, of which the last two are “m” and “b” again.)

Le Monde’s treatment goes into considerably more detail (which is supplemented even more by this earlier article on the incident of January 19). First of all, it seems Moulet was traveling in the company of his girlfriend (his petite amie, or “little female friend”) – not that this makes any appreciable difference, except now it seems that two vacations ended up being ruined instead of just one. His side of the story: The stewardess in question would not cease giving him a funny look after he had tarried somewhat long in the airplane’s toilet, until he finally had to exclaim “You don’t think that I planted a bomb!” The stewardess’ side: As the plane landed, Moulet raised his fist and exclaimed “Oh, shit! The bomb I put in the toilet didn’t work!”

In any event, it was all enough to ensure a special welcoming reception standing by for Moulet at JFK after the plane had taxied to the gate, in the form of federal agents waiting to place him in custody. He then got to spend some time in detention, “in the company,” Le Monde complains, “of prisoners guilty of crimes de sang” (“crimes of blood”), i.e. truly violent offenders. In the end, the solution was found that Moulet would plead guilty to lesser charges and get off with time served and paying a fine of $550, in order just to be able to get on the next available flight and get out of the country and back to France. “In reality, he’s not guilty of anything,” asserted a Monsieur Morice, his lawyer. “But you know that American practice prefers that one plead guilty over there even when one is innocent.” French law is different; you can’t just plead guilty, although that is apparently about to change, at least for lesser crimes (those carrying a penalty of five years in prison or less), and Le Monde brings this fact up to contrast the two systems and, implicitly, to cast doubt on whether that proposed change to French procedure would in fact be a good thing.

Anyway, just wait for the sparks to fly once Moulet is out of the grip of the American authorities. M. Morice made it clear that, once in France, Moulet intends to denounce 1) The conditions under which he was imprisoned by the American authorities; 2) The general way he was treated by the American justice system, and, of course, 3) The conduct of American airlines. But remember, he’ll be doing this in France, not America; somehow, I don’t think too many Frenchmen will care. As for Americans, even if his story had been more widely-reported in the English-language press: Well, especially if the testimony of the stewardess is true as to what he said and the gestures he made, this American is willing to regard him as guilty, and lucky to get off and get back to his home country with a fine. America has had some rather unpleasant experiences with airliners in the New York City area in the not-too-recent past; as I say, American security and air transport personnel these days truly are not ready to joke around, or to have much patience for those that do.

                          

According to the Brussels newspaper Le Soir, there’s no need to give up hope for the Concorde yet. Its potential savior is Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin Atlantic airways. “We are very determined to see the Concorde continue to fly” (translated from the French) he told a recent press conference at London’s Gatwick airport. “We think that it has a potential of 20 to 25 years of life ahead of it.”

Branson pointed out that last year was certainly a bad year for the airline industry as a whole, “but one does not simply get rid of such a marvelous machine forever because of the profit-and-loss from one year” (again, translating from the French). What is more, the British minister (“ministress”?) for Industry and Commerce, Patricia Hewitt, told the BBC that she would be very interested in hearing Mr. Branson’s proposals for reviving use of the aircraft.

Yes, I know this is mainly a British story, so that by rights it should also be covered in one or more of the British papers – so you folks out there can read what’s happening for yourself, and stop having to take my word for everything! How about this, in the Daily Telegraph?