Continental Airlines may run out of cash

Here we go again. 9/11 happened some 3 1/2 years ago, and yet is continually trotted out by mismanaged US airlines as the reason for any problem. It is long past time that this excuse for any ill in the US airline industry ceased to be used at every opportunity.

If nothing else it is in bad taste to continue to exploit those actually affected at the time. But what a contrast to those poorer countries on the other side of the world at the moment. I am quite confident that the likes of Air Lanka or Thai International will make a financial recovery in a much shorter time from a much more significant disaster for their nations, who are already staging "please still come" campaigns for European tourists.

The linked article must have been updated since you posted it, becasue I see no mention of the Tsunami at all.

Does Continental even fly to any Tsunami-affected countries?

I too am confused with the title of your thread. What does your own comparison of the tsunami to the 9/11 terrorist attacks (how can you compare the two?) have to do with CO's financial problems? Nowhere in the article is the tsunami mentioned and nowhere in the article does anyone from CO mention the terrorist attacks. The article was made available yesterday.

Without comparing the magnitude of the disasters or their emotional impact, 9/11 was due to a theoretically preventable cause, directly related to scheduled airline flights. The U.S. and other governments are taking steps (also without getting into how well planned or executed those steps are) to prevent a recurrence. The nature of the event and those steps have had, and continue to have, a dampening effect on air travel independently of what else might be going on in the economy.

The recent tsunami was a natural event which is unlikely to recur for decades or longer, which had no connection to air travel, and that nobody can do much to prevent in any case. (We can do a lot to reduce the damage resulting from a recurrence, but that's not the same thing.) Any impact it might have had on air travel is indirect, based on the desirability of going to the affected regions.

There is no reason the effect of the two disasters on air travel should be similar.

9/11 = Preventable act that instilled fear in people for flying. Maybe not for people on FT, but I'm sure there are many millions of infrequent flyers that had the decision swayed because of it.

Tsunami= Almost unpredictable event that probably doesn't have much impact on peoples' choices to fly. I think people understand that on any given flight, at any given time, there's an inherent risk of an "Act of God" or the like.

While the Tsunami could've wiped out infrastrature or even, sadly, customers for asian airlines, I don't think it really affected the general sentiment of a person's willingness to fly or not. 9/11 definintely did introduce a general reduction in flying, which did not recover to pre-9/11 levels until JUST this past thanksgiving.

Hmmm, I'm pretty sure the OP was talking about badly managed American carriers (who blame everything on 9/11 instead of their own incompetence) and comparing them unfavourably with the well run Asian carriers who are likely to recover quickly from the tsunami disaster.

Incidentally, in Europe the fallout from 9/11 included a couple of national carriers who were allowed to die naturally (a process known as "free market capitalism") and with the exception of Swiss, the European aviation industry is looking comparatively healthy at the moment.

And how "healthy" is Alitalia?

I think a better point of comparison was the SARS scare: manmade (to a point), and with tremendous impact on airline travel (at one point CX had grounded half its fleet, I believe). And they still made money that year. Number of factors contributed to this, but I'd say the fact that CX and SQ are better managed had something to do with that.

I hope I'm not changing the subject (not sure what the subject is), but one point that could be made is that if the US thought that spending billions and billions of dollars in response to 9/11 after the fact is OK, then why don't we spend billions and billions of dollars building massive, 500 foot high seawalls to prevent the next large tsunami? It's a total waste of money in either case, because both events are extremely rare and a 500 foot high seawall would render the coast useless just as the TSA is on its way to rendering air travel useless.

While the number of people currently flying is now back to its former levels, the true demand is not. In 2000 and early 2001, people were still willing to pay a few hundred dollars for an airline ticket. Today, airlines are having to sell tickets for $29 or $99 just to keep the seats filled.

That is, I wonder how much lower passenger counts would be today if the prices charged were the same as in 2000-2001 (adjusted seasonally). A little lower or a lot lower? Hard to tell, but definitely lower.

Too true! I hope once the Italian government faces reality (I think they have quite a bit more of their tax payers money to waste before this happens) Alitalia will merge or die, as will Swiss.

The point I was making is that too many US airlines are being allowed a long, slow lingering death and this is bad for the US industry as a whole. Let two or three of the runts of the litter die off (perhaps starting with US Airways) and this will give the others more of a fighting change.

Edited to add: Perhaps it would be a big help to the US carriers if more the people flying up front were actually paying for it? Just a thought.