ROME, March 3 (Xinhua) -- Business leaders in the Italian island region of Sardinia say they are drafting plans to launch a new air carrier to help it stay in better contact with mainland Italy.
Home to around 1.6 million residents, Sardinia is 187 kilometers from the Italian mainland, and is connected by air and maritime services.
But after the collapse this year of Air Italy -- a regional airline based in the Sardinian city of Olbia -- locals are worrying that the island could become too economically and socially isolated.
"Sardinia cannot continue for long the way it is going," Antonello Bombagi, a Sardinian businessman and one of the leaders of the movement seeking to create a new airline to fill the void left by Air Italy, told Xinhua.
"Sardinia is an island but it is also part of Italy and it has to be connected to the mainland," he said. "If it isn't, the situation will become unbearable."
Italy's flagship air carrier Alitalia continues to serve the Sardinian capital of Cagliari, and budget air carriers easyJet and Ryanair run a few routes to Sardinia from Rome and Milan.
But the demise of Air Italy leaves a gap, according to Andrea Giuricin, a professor of public finance and mobility management at Milan Bicocca University.
"The people of Sardinia clearly miss the routes out of Sardinia that Air Italy ran," Giuricin said in an interview. "This is a difficult period for airlines, and with reductions in tourism because of the outbreak of coronavirus, they will not get any easier."
"It's within the realm of possibility that one or more of the airlines serving Sardinia could cut back on services and then the problems for the island will be even bigger," Giuricin added.
Giuricin noted that Mobi, the main company running maritime ferry services between Sardinia and mainland Italy, is facing its own economic difficulties. The risk that Mobi could reduce its schedule to Sardinia further heightens the importance of air connections for the island.
But Giuricin is not sure that creating a new airline to fill the gap left by a company that struggled for most of its existence is the way to go.
"This is an extraordinarily challenging time to start an airline," Giuricin said. He suggested that rather than investing 50 million euros (56 million U.S. dollars) or more in a startup that would have a tough time surviving, Sardinian business leaders could instead subsidize the cost of air tickets for Sardinian residents buying seats on existing airlines serving the island.
"Spain does something like this with the Canary Islands and the Balearic Islands," Giuricin said. "Tourists and other visitors still pay regular prices, but residents can travel cheaply and the guaranteed business creates an incentive for the regular airlines to continue providing service to the islands."
For his part, Bombagi is convinced a new airline is the best option for Sardinia.
"The reasons Air Italy failed and the reasons Alitalia is struggling are because they were not run the way they should be run," Bombagi said. "We can create our own airline and learn from the mistakes of the airlines that came before."
