I have almost given up on following the news about Alitalia. There is so much conflicting information, no, it's not for the most part really information. There are so many conflicting statements by analysts, politicians, economists and trade unionists that it is really hard to make head or tail of the situation, even for someone like me who has been following Italian current events for three decades.

        This would really be a disaster. There is only one other Italian airline flying Italy's domestic routes and that is the smallish, privately-owned Air One which if the rescue plan were approved would be merged with Alitalia but otherwise will keep on flying (until it goes bankrupt, too). Ryanair and a couple of other low cost airlines fly between some Italian cities, but if Alitalia really does go under travellers are really going to have problems. It will also be the demise of a real piece of Italian history. I still sometimes mourn Pan Am and TWA, once the American airlines par excellence. But Alitalia, which is now trying to get privatized, was a national airline which was really seen here as being an avatar for the country itself.

        I think a lot of people - including the unions which have been keeping the resce plan from going forward, have been mistakenly convinced that in the present context, Air France would make another offer, or perhaps another major airline such as Lufthansa or British Air would ride in like a White Knight. But this would seem unlikely, not because Alitalia wouldn't be quite a prize, but because no one wants to tangle with Italy's recalcitrant and stubborn unions.

        Although like many people, I blame Berlusconi (and his predecessors) for getting us into this situation, I am starting to believe he is right in taking a hard line and insisting on the solution offered by CAI, the group of 16 Italian entrepreneurs that he encouraged in order to "keep Alitalia Italian". In the first place, it is useless to go on saying that the Air France offer of last spring should have been accepted. It wasn't, so we have to go on from here and it is really outrageous that a minority of employees- at least it seems that it is a minority - should be able to jeopardize the future of so many. Alitalia has 2500 pilots, excellent pilots by the way. But should they and part of the flight attendants really be allowed to put 18,000 people out of work?

        And the same goes for CGIL, the biggest of the four labor confederations. Yes, it is more members than the others. But its leader, Guglielmo Epifani, appears to be making some kind of political calculation that we ordinary mortals are not privy to. After all, in the first round of talks, the CGIL air transport union, which I think is called FILT, voted yes to accepting the new contract until CGIL. Later, Epifani reversed this decision.

        Speaking of the pilots, yesterday Fabio Berti, head of the pilots' union, ANPAC, the main opponent of the CAI industrial plan, did something truly outrageous and was allowed to get away with it by the journalist anchoring the program he was appearing on. He actually insinuated that all this pressure on pilots about possibly losing their jobs might result in some kind of accident, as if pilots are not trained to keep their cool in highjackings, terrorist threats, bad weather, mechanical problems and so forth. Today, he reversed himself, saying he'd been misunderstood, but not before giving his union even a worse reputation than it already had.