On Monday, March 10, German air transport was almost completely paralyzed following a massive strike by ground workers at airports organized by the powerful Ver.di union. For example, Berlin airport was completely closed, Frankfurt was unable to provide connections, and Munich and Hamburg were also very disrupted. A total of 3,400 flights had to be cancelled and 500,000 passengers were unable to travel. The purpose of this social conflict is to obtain an increase in the salaries of all employees in this sector. There are 28,000 of them in this country, divided into a wide variety of professions, each of which can ultimately block an activity whose complexity can never be overstated.

Indeed, in air transport, a strong hierarchy has been established over time between the different activities. At the very top of the pyramid are the drivers. They are the best paid, the most considered, and the most pampered by the companies. They are also powerfully unionized and are capable of holding long-term social conflicts that are widely supported by their trade unions. They have always won their arm wrestling with the management of the companies. To tell the truth, they are a bit, because of their capacity to cause harm, the nightmare of management.

Just behind are the commercial sailors. They too are well represented by their unions.On the other hand, it is easier to train cabin crew than pilots. As a result, some carriers—particularly low-cost airlines—tend to overexploit cabin crew, knowing they are more easily replaceable than pilots.

But aircrew alone cannot operate air transport. It takes a whole complex infrastructure on the ground to fly planes safely. There is all the technical and operational part that is essential to ensure the marketing, maintenance and even security functions. We still remember the blockades of airports during the firefighter strikes. But these employees are still very well paid. And then a significant part of the airport functions is often entrusted to subcontractors chosen on economic criteria, in other words because they are the cheapest. The consequence is that they cannot pay their employees at a level close to the salaries applied to those of the major aeronautical groups. However, they too are indispensable and even if their capacity to cause harm is infinitely inferior to that of highly protected employees, I am also thinking of air traffic controllers, they are still able to show their presence. This is what they did in Germany.

Let us cite a few examples, without being sure to cover the wide variety of professions. Let’s take the registrars. Many of them belong to subcontractors. Their status is not recognized and they do not benefit from the transport facilities that their counterparts employed by the companies can enjoy. They work staggered hours, often interrupted by very long unpaid breaks and they suffer, like their colleagues employed by the airlines, the bad moods of passengers, some of whom, fortunately in small numbers, are downright obnoxious. In the chain of exploitation are baggage handlers. No one sees them, but passengers are very happy to find their suitcases on the baggage belts when they arrive. They work outside in all weathers and at all hours.

Passengers must then go through the PIFs (Screening Inspection Stations), which are also served almost exclusively by subcontracting companies. They too suffer from the bad moods of customers who are exasperated by an approach that does not always seem useful to them and sometimes too nitpicky, especially since the procedures are not homogeneous between airports and sometimes even between terminals of the same airport.

And then there are the appliance cleaning employees. They only have about thirty minutes to completely rearrange a cabin. We never see them either, but they do a very honourable job at very different hours. It is hard to imagine the state in which passengers can sometimes leave their seats. We could add the bus drivers, who are a very important component of operational punctuality and who must know how to manoeuvre their machines in the middle of air traffic, or the refuellers, without whom the aircraft would have no fuel.

I certainly forget some, but I think of them every time I take a flight and I always admire when the doors of the aircraft are closed on time and the chocks are removed in time for the aircraft to meet its schedule.

This is a difficult subject to analyze as the interactions between governments and air transport are complex. This starts with the observation that airspace belongs to the states but that its civilian exploitation is carried out by independent operators, whether public or private. However, the latter are ultimately dependent on the sovereign power, if only to obtain exploitation rights.

The first ambiguity comes from air traffic control. This is essential, everyone will agree, and it is most often operated by state administrations whose management capacity is sometimes questionable. This is how the social management of air traffic controllers has a considerable impact on the regularity of airlines. The latter are powerless to ensure that social conflicts are foreseen in advance and that state managers are able to avoid them.

Access to airports is also largely dependent on governments, which can regulate the number of movements at leisure for a wide variety of pretexts. This can go as far as the protection of the national airline. The example of limiting the number of movements at Orly airport to 250,000 under the pretext of the environment was actually taken in 1995 to protect Air France from the probable arrival of British Airways on the airport. On the other hand, the latest limitations on European airports such as Amsterdam, Schiphol or London Heathrow respond well to environmental constraints, not to say ecological pressure.

Traffic rights are a diplomatic weapon of the first order. Since each country is sovereign, it is normal for it to grant operators the right to operate according to its national interests. This is the subject of bargaining whose results are sometimes uncertain. It is surprising, for example, to see French airlines regularly losing market share on their territory to foreign carriers. But sometimes Open Skies agreements, which are fiercely debated between groups of states, can prove to be very profitable. The case of Morocco is very interesting in this respect. After difficult times spent surviving in the face of the wave of European operators, Royal Air Maroc has finally created a Europe-Africa hub at Casablanca airport, of which it is the first user and the first beneficiary.

And then the states use their airlines as an almost obligatory instrument of influence in their necessary international trade. Having your national carrier is a mark of existence and a major economic factor. In this respect, the example of Dubai is very interesting. Once a second-tier emirate in the 1970s and 1980s, it has since become a global magnet through the development of its airport system and its iconic airline, Emirates. Since then, Dubai has passed this first milestone to become a leading economic and financial base. A country like Rwanda seems to have perfectly registered the lesson and is steadily developing its company Rwandair. The same could be said of Ethiopian Airlines, which has become a first-class standard-bearer for his country.

At the end of the Second World War, the United States largely used its two major international carriers, Pan Am and TWA, to dominate the Western world. This observation did not prevent them from abandoning them when the difficulties and perhaps their inadequacy fell on these incumbent carriers.

At its core, air travel may have become a commodity for many countries, but it is nonetheless at the service of governments. The latter also find in the customers of this type of transport a windfall to finance land transport which has difficulty balancing its accounts while air transport is obliged to do so. So instead of being supported economically by governments, it becomes a source of revenue that is blithely drained without being left with the necessary resources to finance its decarbonization, which is nevertheless being demanded loudly by political leaders.

The relationship between governments and air transport is so intertwined, so complex and so ambiguous that it is difficult to see how to unravel them. And this is undoubtedly where the main strength of this sector of activity lies.