At a very first look, aviation industry nowadays has nothing to do with national governments. It was different in the past, but not anymore. At most, governments are shareholders, but that’s it. All private companies workin in open market… dream on.

First, let’s have a look at aircrafts manufacturers, like Boeing and Airbus. Americans do frequently argue that Airbus is somehow financed by french and german governments, via EADS, the consortium holding Airbus, amongst others… It is true that the relation is not so clear.

The standard european answer to that is the way the US government. How’s that ? In capitalism land, the government would be helping a private company ? At least certainly not by awaring it a 10-years 1.1 billion US$ contract. It is well clear that this won’t help Boeing in anyway, as the civilian and military branches are well seperated… oops, did I write that ?

In the past, most of european airlines were state owned and state operated. They all changed their status to private companies, even if states are still shareholders. European regulations also forbid states to directly finance their companies more than one time. After 9 / 11 events, many of them already used that opportunity. But strangely, there are other kinds of state to airline relations…

The UK government is making some pressures on British Airways to make them choose Rolls Royce engines and Airbus airliners for their fleet renewal. In other words, the government wants BA to “buy british”.

This kind of state to private industry relation is everywhere in aviation. Another interesting example can be made by linking two prototype crashes. On the 13th of January 2005, a prototype Pilatus PC-21 did crash during a test flight. As a consequence, the authority decided to ground the second prototype. On the 3rd of February, Pilatus announced being allowed to resume flight testing.

Another crash during certification process occured very recently to seawind, a company developing an amphibian high performance single engine. Seawind is certainly not as strong as Pilatus, and this crash is very likely to kill the company. Here again, all flight testing has been suspended by authority. However, one month after the crash, testis seem far from resuming.

By the way, did I mention that the PC-21 is a military trainer, and that Switzerland is on the customers list ?

Not to mention the 2 billion swiss francs put by Switzerland to revive Swissair, nor the fact that it is impossible for any non-french pilot to get hired by Air-France, nor that it is only a very recent change in law that allows non US carriers to operate US national flights.

I’ll stop the list here, but such examples are by far not isolated, making clear that is formally aviation is no longer a state industry, governmental influence is still very present.