Ultimately, I think large scale personal air travel (or mass transit in general) isn't feasible in all economic climates. By definition, it's high upfront costs and low margins. The only airlines who seem to always make it work are regional and shuttles between high-income cities (Alaska, JetBlue.) As for why don't we just nationalize them, I'd say we de facto have already. Airlines know bankruptcy-level downside is covered by the government.
It's not all bad though; there's an argument to be made that this system is pareto efficient. During bull times, you want private operators pushing for network expansions and price efficiencies, even if that means levering up. But these are a de facto utility, so having the government pinch their nose and cover the downside in a bear market is an efficient use of dollars. You could try and put in regulation to force them to reserve X months (years isn't realistic) of operation costs, but you can't get around the basic unit economics of the problem: planes are expensive, even if they're grounded and don't make money if they can't fly.
Washington State nationalized the ferries, and they now run at massive losses a system that used to run at a profit.
Because history shows they can be run at a profit with the same fare, at no cost to the taxpayers.
> For anyone living on an island, they are the only 'road' in or out.
Evidently this wasn't a problem when the system was a "mosquito fleet" of private ferries.
So can highways; Private toll roads are a thing. Doesn’t mean the National Highway System is bad.
If you have a point to make, make it.
Care that becomes faster, cheaper and better is a goal. With the exception of some pharmaceutical regulatory capture shenanigans and administrative bloat due to growing regulations, the healthcare system actually does a really good job at achieving at least two of those goals. Pretty much every treatment available 20 to 30 years ago is faster and better today. Some are cheaper, and some are more expensive.
Saying the ferries were "nationalized" makes it sound like the government forced a bunch of operators -- or, well, that single operator -- to quit and just took over their business, but again, it looks like it's a bit more complicated than that. That remaining operator, the Puget Sound Navigation Company, got into a big fight with their union when they were demanding higher wages -- and the one point the state can be blamed for in this original saga is that they refused to let the operator raise their fares, although they were largely responding to public demand, according to the Seattle Times in 1951 (when this happened): the public didn't actually like that private operator, and thought they had raised their fares too much over the past decade while providing increasingly worse service. PSNC decided not to restart service, and the state offered to buy them out -- again, not what most people would call "nationalization."
If the state did a bad job running the ferries for the subsequent decades up until about the 2010s, there's no immediately accessible litany of complaints I can find. An investigation in 2017 seems like it's led to a lot of accusations about how the ferry service's labor costs had been managed since 2012.
In any case, this is fascinating history -- but it doesn't seem like a resoundingly knockout argument for "private monopoly good, government-run service bad."
The government forced the private ones out of business by setting fares, rates, schedules, routes and pay. It didn't add up.
If that's the case, then it wold be more efficient to remove the "de facto" and operate as the reality.
https://www.singaporeair.com/ https://www.qatarairways.com/ https://www.koreanair.com/ https://www.jal.com/ https://www.malaysiaairlines.com/
That is, make it so they can't compete on "whether they anticipated a global catastrophe".
Once you have a national carrier they want bailout after bailout. Politically it looks bad to let your national airline fail, and they know it.