“Making Malpensa an hub is an act of political coherence.”

The Industrial Union in the province of Varese is worried about the future of Malpensa, after that the (already very contested) Decreto Lupi has been rejected. And now industrialists ask for a trend reversal in the dualism Linate-Malpensa, aiming at making  the stopover of Varese a real hub of Northern Italy. “This is a matter of political coherence with the several, including the recently ones, public investments that have been already made.”

“The rejection of the Decreto Lupi concerning the flights to Linate by the European Union should be a good news for those who, as the Industrial Union of the province of Varese, have always sustained that the air-traffic priority in Northern  Italy should be to give back to Malpensa its role as hub,” said Riccardo Comerio, president of Univa. However this does not conceal the concerns regarding a scenario that is still not clear: “We still have the doubt that the negative surprises haven’t ended yet. We fear that the text on which the government is working on could be worse than the previous one. In theory this could be a good chance to make an act of political coherence.” The president of Univa is talking about “the coherence among the several, including the recently ones, public investments that have been already invested in Malpensa and its connections, and a real air transport policy that put the same airport at the heart of the intercontinental connections to and from the country.”

For 20 years interventions have been made, first of all highways and railways, new infrastructural works have been constructed, as the railway T1-T2, and others have been planned, as the railway continuation T2-Gallarate and the new state highway 341.

“One of the most absurd things of this matter is that on the one hand resources to improve Malpensa connections with the surrounding areas keep on being rightly allocated, but on the other hand, making choices that are not understandable from the coherence point of view, the air traffic in the same stopover has been reduced.

The logical thing that should be done after the rejection of the Decreto Lupi is that institutions at  all levels become active in order to seize this opportunity and give at last, once and for all, an answer to the questions that we are asking:  When will Malpensa return to being the reason for which it was born, a hub?

When will the enterprises interests of one of the most important productive systems of Europe’s society, and so, national, prevale on the ones of a single air-logistic society?”

They said the worry is evident and it refers to the risk that a new decree will point to empowering once again Linate’s airport, the terminal that since 1999 became residual and that (from de-hubbing of Alitalia and afterwards) acquired more and more air traffic, despite the evident structural limits. “Rumours are not the best ones. Once again we talk about an effort to work on a new text that would repair the formal vices of the pre-expo version, but that always points to the same result: to liberalise the Linate’s flights, on which the companies like Alitalia (that is not a casual example) could do trips not only to any European airport (that would already be a good thing), but also to extra-European destinations, like to Abu Dhabi (there are no other definitions for this hypothesis).

Once again the Unione Industriali is against this will to diminish Malpensa in favour of Linate. We say this strongly, with the indignation of those people that cannot stand any other short term political decisions that cannot programme the future of our nation. Neither in front of the evident needs of an economical system, like the one of Northern Italy, to have an access to the business world. A door, a bridge, not a little one, like the Linate one, that the fact to be wider would mean a rather advantage for particular interests.

We have always been saying this. In these years we flooded the local and national newspapers’ editors with declarations that fully support Malpensa. On each table, as well as we could, we struggled for our true hub. An activity that has been unrolled even separately, at each contact and at each level. We did it towards any executive, no matter their political alignment or their technical composition. Either before and after the dehubbing, that was decided in 2008 in favour of the new Alitalia. Now it is the best moment to take precise, courageous and far-seeing decisions. To us, Malpensa would be something different: an intercontinental airport, and there aren’t any doubts about this.”