CNN – They’ve long dominated the food and fashion worlds, this year they’ve dominated sports, and now they’re aiming for the skies.Italy’s new national airline, ITA Airways, launched on Friday with a promise to bring pride back to its national flag carrier, after Alitalia, Italy’s legacy airline, went bankrupt and ceased operations a day earlier.Executives unveiled plans for the new network, airplanes, staffing and livery at a press conference livestreamed from Rome.
The first thing to know: everything will be centopercento italiano.The new ITA Airways planes will be colored sky-blue, with staff wearing uniforms by top Italian designers. Interiors and airport lounges will be dressed by high-class Italian firms, and even the cars and minibuses used to move around the grounds will be Italian.”We have been born as a new Italian brand, and we have chosen to work only with Italian companies,” said Alfredo Altavilla, president of ITA Airways.
Ciao, Alitalia
TheNewYorkTimes – Alitalia may have had its faults, but how many airlines can claim to have been the “pope’s airline” for over five centuries?
According to Flying Pontiff Quarterly, the trade journal that has covered papal air travel for some centuries now, recent scholarship has unearthed a long-buried document in the overdue section of the Vatican library purporting to trace Alitalia’s role as the official carrier of supreme pontiffs to the papacy of Julius II (1503-13).
The document, titled in Latin “Numquam ad Tempus” (“Never on Time”), asserts that Alitalia had its beginning in the early 1500s, a time of great turbulence (grande turbolenza) and papal fastening of seatbelts as the Holy See engaged in fierce power struggles with the Holy Roman Empire, France, Venice, Naples, Florence and Reykjavik.
Julius tasked Leonardo da Vinci, inventor, painter and all-around Renaissance man, with devising a “conveyance for timely and efficacious removal of the person of the supreme pontiff, in the event of unpleasantness (spiacevolezza).”
La strategia di Ita per non essere una nuova Alitalia
AGI – La nuova compagnia aerea dovrà fare utili, essere sostenibile e connettere il Paese.
Venerdì è stato il primo giorno di operatività per Ita Airways che, garantisce l’ad Fabio Lazzerini, sarà la “compagnia di bandiera italiana” Lazzerini ha aggiunto: “ci dobbiamo meritare di essere la compagnia di bandiera”-
I pilastri del piano
I tre pilastri del nuovo piano di Ita sono: profittabilità, sostenibilità e connettività. Lazzerini ha sottolineato: “La profittabilità rappresenta una discontinuità immensa” rispetto al passato, ha aggiunto. C’è poi la sostenibilità economica, ambientale e sociale. E poi la connettività, il paese era sottoservito soprattutto su rotte intercontinentali”.
