Aer Lingus has a lot of changing to do in cyclical sector

Aer Lingus stands on the threshold of privatisation at an interesting time. Airline earnings in all areas except Asia/Pacific have been unusually stable for an unusually long period of time, which has made the industry nervous. For a sector used to a cyclical roller-coaster ride which tends to reflect - indeed overreact to - the ups and downs of global and regional economies, being stable is a disorientating experience.

They are all waiting for the downturn they are accustomed to. Normally, an economic event as massive as the Asia/Pacific crash would have sparked one, but the airline industry has survived the shock waves which hit it in Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America. Perhaps today's more businesslike airlines are more resilient than they used to be, despite living in an increasingly unprotected, competitive environment.

Airline alliances are part of the new world of commercial air transport. They are not about helping the customer, although they say they are. They are about protecting the member airlines from spiralling competition in an increasingly deregulated marketplace.

They are a soft form of industry consolidation without mergers or takeovers. The world is not yet politically ready for the latter.

Airlines are still seen as peculiarly national commodities, even when privatised. This concept, in its turn, will die. Airlines will eventually become businesses like any other - possibly components in multinational aviation companies.

Ironically, however, the joint marketing power of all the new groups have, without exception, persuaded the travellers that there's really something in it for them.

For that reason, alliances like the massive Lufthansa and United Airlines-led Star Alliance have been a commercial winner for the member airlines.

Not only do they offer attractive global travel packages, but they can save the participants money by combining resources, eliminating all sorts of duplication from engineering to check-in, and win economies of scale by negotiating jointly for equipment purchase.

When alliances first began to be forged in the late 1980s and early 1990s it was not unusual for an equity exchange to take place. Delta Air Lines and Swissair bought 5 per cent of each other's stock, for example. It was symbolic, and the practice has gone out of fashion now.

Today, alliances like the One World group start with a pair of powerful leaders such as American Airlines and British Airways, and they expect others to join, bringing benefits to the group, not to advance with a begging bowl. The situation was most incisively put by Mr Frederico Bloch, chief executive of a Central American airline consortium called Grupo TACA, who said: "An airline can only bring one of two things to an alliance: money or market dominance."

Aer Lingus is not bringing money to One World, so it can offer only its strong place in the Irish market. Ireland is a significant - and growing - niche market in the top left hand corner of Europe which no established major carrier (British Airways, for instance) would risk trying to develop in its own right when it can enlist native expertise and experience through an alliance.

So if the Irish Government is hoping for a major injection of One World cash into Aer Lingus as a quid pro quo for kindly allowing its baby to join a global alliance, it's dreaming. Aer Lingus is supposed to contribute in return for membership in today's world.

Looking at what British Airways has done in Europe so far, consider Air Liberte, in France. BA bought a majority shareholding in it when it was almost bankrupt and the shares were a bargain, thus gaining a foothold in Air France's domestic heartland which would otherwise have been made administratively impossible by the French government, which would have strangled the takeover with red tape.

Future Aer Lingus shareholders can comfort themselves in the knowledge that if Aer Lingus equity crashes at some time in the future, a not-so-white knight might be there to buy the ailing shares. If not British Airways, Richard Branson, perhaps?

The airline industry is a peculiar one. It has been nationally owned and, until the 1980s, nationally protected. It has changed a great deal, but has a lot of changing to do yet.

Who knows what the future holds, because the territory is uncharted.

David Learmount is operations editor of Flight International magazine