‘Spirit of Australia’? The idea of the national carrier is long dead

It struck me as I was sitting on a hotel bed in San Sebastian, staring at the tracking app on my phone for about the 50th time, trying to figure out if my lost luggage would be returned to me tonight, or if I would still be waiting and hoping tomorrow morning.

This was the second time my trusty silver suitcase had gone missing, or “experienced an irregularity”, while flying through Germany with Lufthansa. A late-arriving flight and a very tight connection in Munich – and, a few months earlier, Frankfurt – had done for my baggage, leaving me with a newly purchased toothbrush, a laptop and an eye mask and not much else.

This, I realised, does not fit the German stereotype of efficiency. Delayed flights? Lost luggage? And that’s more than a stereotype too, because Germany really is a country in which most things run smoothly and predictably, taken care of by people who approach such things very seriously.

And yet on the country’s national air carrier, Lufthansa, I had experienced dramas and annoyances more than once in just a few months. What gives?

The idea of a national carrier is a romantic notion that must have developed sometime around the Golden Age of Flying, when getting on a plane meant dressing up in your best finery and eating sumptuous meals on china crockery while puffing your way through a pack of cigarettes.

Now we get around in Bintang singlets and Fila slides, but the idea that every serious country has a national carrier, a brand to serve its citizens and represent its home nation to the rest of the world, has persisted. Journalists often use this terminology as a classic second mention, when you don’t want to write the word “Qantas” repeatedly, you naturally slip in “the national carrier”.

We don’t seem to have realised that that notion is dead. It’s gone the way of the suits and cocktail dresses and armchair ashtrays. It has been destroyed by capitalism, by privatisation, by the importance of shareholders and profits over service and representation.

Just a few weeks ago, Australia’s notional national carrier announced a few changes to its schedules for the coming months. Due to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and associated rises in fuel cost, Qantas will cut 5 per cent of its domestic capacity across its flagship brand and Jetstar from May.

Some services to rural centres will be cut completely: Melbourne to Hamilton Island will be suspended; Sydney to Busselton is on hold; Melbourne to Coffs Harbour is also suspended; Darwin to the Gold Coast is off. Flights between popular capital cities on larger aircraft will be reduced. US flights will have reduced capacity on smaller planes.

Those larger, long-range aircraft won’t sit idle, however. They’re being redeployed to routes between Australia and Europe, which have experienced an uptick in popularity and are far more profitable for the airline, with revenue per available seat kilometre set to double on those European flights on previous estimates.

The ‘national carrier’ is an anachronism, one we should look back on fondly, while also realising that, for the most part, it no longer exists.

If you’re a tourism operator in Margaret River, or Hamilton Island, or Coffs Harbour, hoping for business in the cooler months, hard luck. If you’re a tourist planning a winter holiday, same goes. Your flights were going to reduce Qantas’s profitability.

This shows up the farcical nature of the idea of a national carrier. Once an airline is privatised, it may trade on the idea of representation and service to a nation when it suits it, but its key service is to its shareholders. Private companies don’t represent national values, or place value on vital services to citizens. They make money.

There are still a few majority government-owned and truly national carriers out there. Emirates is one (along with Etihad, which shares the title for the UAE). Malaysia Airlines is another. Qatar. Singapore Airlines. Ethiopian Airlines. Even the Kiwi government maintains its majority ownership in Air New Zealand.

These airlines do still serve their nations, and they’re broadly representative of their home country’s culture and characteristics: Emirates is sleek and modern; Singapore Airlines is friendly and efficient; Air New Zealand is laidback and welcoming; Ethiopian puts the lie to global assumptions about its home.

Elsewhere, however, those airlines that have been privatised over the years tend not to stick so closely to the stereotypes.

British Airways long ago ceased to be an airline of genteel good manners and upper-crust service. JAL does a good enough job, but doesn’t feel quite in line with Japan’s highly polished aesthetics. Lufthansa’s on-time performance sits below 80 per cent, putting it outside the top 10 in Europe.

And those that never were government entities certainly don’t represent their country’s citizens, even if they would like to think of themselves as the national carrier: American Airlines, for example, or LATAM, or Ryanair (I’m kidding – mostly).

We live in a world now where laidback Aussies are just out there trying to maximise profits, and prim and proper Brits are trying to squeeze you into terrible seats, and efficient Germans have no idea where your suitcase has gone.

The “national carrier” is an anachronism, one we should look back on fondly, while also realising that, for the most part, it no longer exists.