I spent 20 years at the airline. During that time, I observed that we dwelled too long on plans waiting for clearance from the Ministry. We were destined to fail; private airlines could make similar changes! decisions in days while we waited months. So we were always behind our competitors in our moves. Projects and plans were delayed for so long that their chances of success were actually "killed" by this bureaucratic process. We had to battle with the management team and then with government officials to get project approval. This lingers projects in the pipeline for months and then years in many cases. In my experience, the decision-making processes were extremely slow. Similar comments were made by a former senior executive who recalled We just kind of kept things going and going. . . . the problem was management could not halt some of these costly projects and reallocate the resources elsewhere without the consent of the big elephant in the room, the government . . . Until someone in the Ministry could admit failure and muster the courage to order managers to "kill" such [fail- ing} projects or (unprotable) routes, we just carried on because there was cash ow from the government and other supports. So there was no reason to disagree with them. A former head of department also commented along similar lines: We had to wait for months for government approval before we could \"kill'I or end a project. The inability to stop operations on unprotable