SkyEurope airline goes bust

It's a hard life flying planes in a global recession. You can weather a storm, go through lightning, or even land on the Hudson River, but you can't fligh through a wall of bankers however hard you try. Of course it isn't just the bankers giving the airlines a hard time. The flying public can be very capricious when it comes to airline loyalty. The airlines have cut ticket prices so low that they are relying on funnelling the tax monies through bank accounts to make up some extra revenue. The latest casualty is SkyEurope.

SkyEurope probably had two problems. Not so many Eastern Europeans flying west and not enough Western Europeans taking advantage of holidaying in countries like Slovakia. When one hears the BBC continuing to talk of holidays in the UK being better value than the eurozone it only partly tells the story. Slovakia offers fantastic value holidays but that's generally lost on the British public. Slovakia's restaurants provide good meals for a fiver!

There's only so much to go around, I suppose. I get the impression that western capitalism is some kind of giant merry-go-round, with loads of loosely fitting horses. Every so often one shoots off into the crowd, getting broken in the process. Eventually the man in charge gets a new horse fitted, but it hasn't completely stopped his merry-go-round in the meantime.

So SkyEurope is the latest casualty to hit the decks. But it won't put the dampeners on the industry. Even as I type there are those with ambition and bully for them. Birmingham European Airways is hoping to launch one day, so the aviation merry-go-round at least is happy in the fairground of financial fortune.