At his meeting in Vienna last week with the Association of European Airlines (AEA), Daniel Calleja, the EC's designated director for air transport, got a brief whiff of what he is in for over the next few years.
AEA have not jointly made a profit since 1998 and in that time have collectively lost €6bn.
Any hopes of a return to profitability this year have been ruined by the surging cost of fuel. Another collective loss beckons.
As if to rub home the point, Vagn Soerensen, chairman of AEA and ceo of Austrian Airlines, told him: ““Our business is subject to deep-seated structural inefficiencies and they must be addressed by a regulatory programme which sees the Big Picture.”
It might be better instead of looking to the EC to sort out Europe's cluttered aviation industry, the AEA and its members looked closer to home.
The statement “In the airline industry, the barriers to exit are very high, the barriers to entry are low. Consequently overcapacity has become a major problem affecting the profitability of the industry,” seems to sum up accurately enough one of the main problems affecting European aviation.
Of course it appeared in the AEA's Action Plan launched just last month. The analysis is correct. There are simply too many airlines chasing too few passengers in Europe. And it is a problem that Mr Calleja's predecessors have been well aware of as they have been advocating consolidation in European aviation for years. Unfortunately their views have fallen on deaf ears.
The Financial Times pointedly observed in an article in September: “It is possible that somebody among Alitalia's 21,000 employees genuinely thinks Italy's flag carrier can carry on like this. This person has deluded himself that an airline that is under the thumb of politicians, has been run by three chief executives in the past year and faces rearguard action from unions over its latest survival plan has a future.
“There are probably quite a few employed by Swiss International Air Lines who (a little more plausibly) believe there is still a place in Europe for a medium-sized, full service, flag carrying airline.”
It would not be difficult to add several more names to this melancholy list: Malev and Olympic Airways - both AEA members - come immediately to mind. There are too many airlines in Europe whose existence, in purely aviation terms, is pointless.
Europe needs three, perhaps four major hubs for long haul traffic: London Heathrow, Frankfurt, Paris CDG and Amsterdam. Most other major cities in the continent are just short hops from these centres. There is no need for small airlines to run transatlantic services. Is it necessary or even feasible that cities like Brussels or Zurich should make themselves into major hubs?
It is in this duplicating of services that part of Europe's costly inefficiencies lie.
The arrival and establishment of so many low cost carriers which are making healthy profits merely emphasises the limitations of these smaller carriers. The low cost operators already have 18% of the European market and that share will surely rise.
Their business will come not just from new routes but from the legacy carriers. Can loss-making airlines hope to survive in this climate without continued aid and loans? And will the EC allow it?
National pride may be massaged by the existence of a national carrier but in aviation and economic terms, too many of them make little sense.
This, no doubt, will be among the points Mr Calleja will make after he has studied the AEA's Action Plan.