Speculating on the future is fun, of course. It is a useful vehicle through which we can put on display all our innermost fears, prejudices and exasperation with the present.

What we should not do though is paint the past in quite such rosy colours...

>>TAA and Ansett were good airlines until they fell foul to the vanity of world stages.<<

TAA and Ansett were a duopoly whose rape and pillage of their customer base bordered on the criminal. They flew to the same cities, at the same times, every day, and between them maintained exorbitant prices under the complete fiction of being in "competition".

Then, as now, there was no entity with the power (or the inclination) to curb such rip-offs, so my business, and many others, were bilked every time we needed to fly anywhere.

I remember clearly how the establishment resisted every single attempt to create a proper market, managing to squeeze out one competitor after another with some extremely dubious practices.

And I also that when we finally managed to get some decent competition from a company willing to take them on - despite having to operate from makeshift terminals etc. etc. - how the prices tumbled. A return flight between Sydney and Melbourne settled down (after the initial slash-and-burn discounting) from around $650 to around $250.

And the prices have remained in that region ever since. Amazing.

TAA and Ansett "good" airlines? In a pig's arse, as John Elliott was so fond of saying.

Pericles,
Sorry, I didn't mean they were good in the 'nice' sense I meant as an airline they worked well.
I still have my cardboard Ansett credit card.
Certainly the last person you would trust in a business deal would be Sam Abels.
He shafted me over Ansett ParcelFast.
Anywhere in Australia to anywhere in Australia $5.00. It cost me five courier companies because all he wanted was the courier accounts for TNT.