ABSTRACT
This study deals with two important issues relating to the European airline business: the privatisation drive and the safety aspect. With regards to privatisation, we investigate recent trends and provide an overview of the current situation at the various important European airlines. As regard safety, we first focus on a theoretical framework, we then turn our attention to the American experience, and finally we consider European data.
It is clear that, as yet, no sensible analysis is possible of the impact on safety of the privatisation drive in the European airline industry. On the one hand, this is due to the fact that deregulation and privatisation are quite recent phenomena in Europe, but it is, in part, also attributable to the aggregated nature of the available data.
