I'll preface my remarks on airline industry bailouts with the disclosure of interest as an airline industry consultant.
Both direct subsidies to airlines and indirect subsidies in the form of vouchers for customers beg the question of whether air transportation is enviromentally and socially something we want to encourage. The technology of air transportation did not evolve guided by the invisible hands of sovereign consumer demand and private investor self interest. It blossomed in the hothouse of war. The same can be said for the computer. Private industry developed as offshoot of the military research and development. Traditionally the airlines have also recruited pilots who received their initial training in the military. One needs to learn to think in terms of the "military-industrial complex" as more or less seamlessly phasing into the civilian economy. A 747 is not a B-52, but the former can only exist as the product of an technological industrial order that has first developed the capability of producing the latter. The palm pilot is an offshot of anti-aircraft ballistics guidance systems and the internet is the son of ARPAnet. Perhaps there is a sense in which war is 'bred in the bone' of much of advanced technology. Perhaps that is one terrible lesson we can learn from the use of civilian airliners as weapons of mass destruction. Beating our swords into ploughshares may be both more urgent and more complicated than we imagine. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
