It’s no surprise that the issue dominating European news over the last week has been the fallout – in the literal sense – of the Icelandic volcano eruption that has paralyzed most of Europe as an air-flight originator and destination. What has been the surprise is the substantial and expensive impact such an unexpected natural phenomenon had on the very fabric of the economy and other aspects of European life.

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. (more…)

Horrors! Further snowfall hit yesterday across Northern Europe, and now the Danish newspaper Politiken features the screaming headline Danes caught in airport-chaos. (Note that it’s really not accurate to describe Politiken as a sensationalist tabloid; if that’s what you’re looking for, try Ekstrabladet, among others, and you’ll be able to see the difference on the very homepage.)

The snow came down particularly heavy in England, canceling several Premier League football games (if you want an indication about just how serious it really turned out to be), so the paper’s Astrid Søndberg mainly concentrates on the travails at London’s Heathrow airport. “I spent the night in terminal 5 together with 2,000 others,” reveals on-the-spot witness Line Bjørn. Everyone needs to rebook their flights due to the weather, she says, but “that’s going to slowly since there are not enough personnel. They can’t come out to the airport because of the weather.” Naturally, both the telephone service and website of her carrier – British Airways, note bene – are also down. Similar scenes occurred in Dublin and Amsterdam, according to an SAS Airlines spokesman.

One of the latest developments on the European economic front – during what are otherwise these dog days of a European summer, when most everyone is off on vacation – is the recent announcement that British Airways and the Spanish carrier Iberia have begun discussions about an eventual merger. Featured in that FT piece was this quote from BA chief executive Willie Walsh: “The combined balance sheet, anticipated synergies and network fit between the airlines make a merger an attractive proposition, particularly in the current economic environment.” “Synergies”; “network fit”: I guess one doesn’t get to be CEO of a major international airline like BA without being able to tick the necessary B-school jargon boxes, but what is all that really supposed to mean?

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.