The blue fable gives a somewhat one-sided image of KLM as a ‘wrong’ company

‘That was one of the big problems of KLM: that little rotten country, in which no one was interested, with that much too large airline.’ Ernst van der Beugel, president-director of the Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij from 1961 to 1963, did not think the company very highly.

It is clear why Ties Joosten includes the quote in The blue fable † Why we’ve been keeping KLM in the air at all costs for a century. Joosten, who emphatically describes himself as a climate journalist, also has little interest in KLM.

The blue fable is the first non-fiction work to be published by the journalistic research platform Follow The Money. The smoothly written book gives rise to the image of a largely redundant, often loss-making, highly polluting, arrogant and corrupt company. A somewhat one-sided image too.

It is noticeable that the journalist does not extensively check allegations about, for example, bribes. This makes it very easy for the image of a ‘wrong’ company to linger. Furthermore, there is no music machine. The reader cannot ascertain what Joosten has heard first hand and what he has drawn from newspaper articles, books and other documents.

Saved time and time again

That does not detract from the question of why KLM is allowed to hold up its hand time and again. That question is once again topical, now that The Hague is pouring billions into the company, which, like the rest of aviation, has been hit amidships by the corona crisis. Joosten’s answer: politics that is always guided by false nationalist sentiments. That is very short sighted.

Nevertheless: KLM would have gone bankrupt ten times since its foundation in 1919 if politics had not come to the rescue every time. The latter led investors to plunge into obscure adventures because they knew they weren’t running a great deal of risk. Father Staat, on the other hand, usually did not see any of his money back.

Aviation historian Marc Dierikx also pointed out something like this in his book blue in the sky, which appeared in 1999 to mark the 80th anniversary of KLM. What Joosten observes is that the government has continued to pump money into the company this century. That is not just about 5.1 billion euros in corona support. It also concerns the three-quarters of a billion with which the state bought a larger stake in Air France-KLM in 2019. So that The Hague would have just as big a voice as Paris in the merger company into which Koninklijke Koninklijke had been absorbed in 2004.

It became a palace revolt that came to nothing. Not on the desired extra seat in the boardroom. They did get angry heads in Paris, where at the beginning of this year, KLM CEO Pieter Elbers, as a symbol of Dutch rebellion, bonjour to the exit, a failure that came too late for The blue fable.

KLM’s history is anything but unique. In the pioneering phase, all governments subsidized the first airline to emerge on their territory to claim the sovereignty of their airspace. It took the Italians until the end of last year to get their flag carrier Alitalia to be buried. After its foundation in 1946, it made one profit.

pamphlet

In the epilogue changes The blue fable in a pamphlet. Then the activist beats the journalist in Joosten. Then KLM turns out to be just an outgrowth of an industry that thrives on tax-free kerosene and other government subsidies. As far as Joosten is concerned, KLM could be a head smaller. At the same time, he realizes that the planet will not benefit if only KLM shrinks. The number of flights to and from Schiphol must also be reduced, otherwise Ryanair and Qatar will close the gap.

But even a purely smaller Schiphol will not save the climate. That’s the whole point with aviation: it’s a global industry where there is always a lower well into which the water flows.

There is no reason to leave the flaws in KLM or Schiphol as it is. But for the higher goal that Joosten has in mind, more needs to be done: flying less worldwide. About the consequences of this is in The blue fable not much to read. For example, what do we do with the poor countries that depend on tourism for their prosperity?

To paraphrase Van der Beugel: that small, vulnerable planet with its much too large aviation deserves another book. A more convincing book.