Quoted By:
What's your favorite defunct airline? Why did it disappear?
For me it's Ansett. They went bankrupt back in September 2001, though they stuck around until 2002 as an A320-only low cost carrier in the hopes of finding a buyer.
Their bankruptcy had a few causes
>Deregulation of the Australian airline market put increased pressure on their revenues
>Most of their major investments (including a part share in the now-defunct America West airlines) performed poorly
>Their 767 fleet was aging and regularly had maintenance issues, culminating in their 767 fleet being grounded in Christmas 2000 and their entire fleet being grounded in Easter 2001, which was an expensive loss.
>Air New Zealand bought them out and merged with them in early 2000. ANZ didn't really have the capital available for their own modernization needs, let alone those of Ansett, so the result was that both companies were severely undercapitalised. (ANZ would go bankrupt around the same time as Ansett and had to be renationalised)
>Air New Zealand's attempts to reduce the operating costs of Ansett had detrimental effects on service quality. Their aim was to keep the same revenue while getting costs down, since that was somewhat successful for Air New Zealand, but in Ansett it had the effect of driving away customers who wanted premium service
>They spent a large amount of money to become the official sponsors of the Sydney 2000 Olympics, but didn't see much return on it since Qantas had a much stronger brand image internationally as Australia's airline, and combined with some guerilla marketing by Qantas a large number of people just assumed that Qantas was the official sponsor anyway.
After Singapore Airlines and Qantas pulled back from buying Ansett Mk.1 when it was in administration, there were plans to keep it flying in a smaller form put forward by the Tesna Consortium, but since the government didn't offer them any support they pulled back and Ansett Mk. 2's last flight landed on March 4th 2002.
