Patraja Air (Patraja)

The Patrajan Air Travel Corporation, often simply stylized to Patraja Air, is the sole legal domestic airline in the country of Patraja, formed in March 17th, 2003, under the Sectional Provisions of the Safer National Airline Regulation Act, which officiated the consolidation of all air travel within Patraja to one semi-governmental entity in 2002. The SNAR Act was formed in reaction to the Flight 313, 453, and 670 Incidents of 2002, and essentially banned private corporations from domestic air operations within Patraja. The Patrajan Air Travel Corporation was formed soon after under government mergers of both public and previously-private corporate entities. Most notably, the large air corporations of Karneja Airlines and the Praxton Airline Corporation were nationalized and merged into the new airline. In 2005, Patraja Air officially launched to the public after three years of preparations and rebranding of services, airplanes, airports, and other such information pieces.

Currently, Patraja Air still serves as the sole legal airline within Patraja, but with the 2013 International Flights Amendment Act, it is not the sole airline allowed to travel from other countries into Patraja - starting with its implementation in 2014, the IFA Act allows international companies to travel into Patraja for immigration, but not to assist in emigration. In 2020, Patraja Air was also moved from the Senatorium Subcommittee on International Travel to the newly-made Ministry of Commercial Air Management, to be commanded directly by the Minister.

Founding and Early Years
Patraja Air was founded after the SNAR Act's reaction to the Patrajan Airline Crash Incidents of 2002, where several aircraft plummeted to a nearly-100% fatality rate within one month of one another. After this event and public outcry over the shoddy shape of the Patrajan airline industry. After weeks of deliberation, the Confederal Peoples Congress abolished the previous government-sponsored airline, the Air Patraja United Airline Company, and officially passed the SNAR Act. The SNAR Act banned the operation of any international commercial airlines within Patraja, which were blamed by the government for the crashed planes, and immediately requested the creation of a national semi-governmentally supported airline from the usage of government planes, old APUAC planes, along with nationalized planes from private airlines within the nation.

Weeks later, preliminary plans were put into place after a meeting with the then-former heads of private airlines within the country, which apparently ended in a fistfight between government and corporate officials. Regardless, provisions for a Patrajan air corporation were submitted to the Congress for approval, funding, responsibility allocation, along with general assistance. On March 17th, 2003, the officially-named Patrajan Air Travel Corporation was made, and the lead architect of the SNAR Act's bureaucratic provisions, former Minister of Finance Romain Marello, was put in place as the interim President, Chairman, and CEO. He would, upon the official travel launch of the corporation in 2005, be named permanent Founder and Chairman, with his other roles delegated to other people.

Soon after, on March 20th, the first logo of "Patraja Air," as the corporation began calling itself, was revealed to the public. The logo was received with ambiguous mixture, with the public essentially disliking its focus on vague simplicity. After weeks of intercorporate and governmental discussion for the semi-purchase, semi-nationalization of private airlines, payments to the former owners and merged entities involved in the creation of Patraja Air were made on June 15th, 2005, and all debts, acquisitions, and ownership of planes, storage, fuel, and other such private properties were considered final, and in the hands of the new Patraja Air.

On June 18th, 2005, the Senatorium Subcomittee on International Travel was formed within the Congressional branches of administration to, as the creation purpose document stated, "moderately administrate and contribute government aid and public advice towards the semi-independent national airline entity formed herein." Staffed within the subcommittee was Apollonia Marello, sister of founder and then-leader of the company, Romain Marello. In 2008, Apollonia was dismissed from the subcommittee on unproven but acted-upon charges of corruption, and in 2010, Apollonia was impeached from her office of Senator altogether after a moral scandal broke out which led to a divorce between herself and her husband.

On September 20th, 2005, after months of repainting, restructuring of airport systems, and cooperation between international airlines and countries, the provisional airline checks, pilots, and government-funded entities that kept travel going dispersed, and Patraja Air, as a corporation, took over the airline transit of the entire country. Though airports were still privately-owned and not held to governmental interference, the fact that no other airline existed within the nation, or even arriving into the nation (until 2013), served as incentive enough for all private airports to service Patraja Air as their sole airline custodians.

Soon after the start of the airline travel, a notable and appreciated lack of delays, accidents, or other untimely and unplanned events shocked both public and anti-regulation groups, with the Patrajan government taking a humble pride across multiple advertisements for the airline in the "zero wait time" policy for all flights. Indeed, until 2010, Patraja Air has a zero-tolerance rule for making customers wait to board a plane and take off - surprisingly, this led to no safety or security incidents despite the pressure put on mechanical and pilot staff to lack any errors. In 2010, this corporate policy was changed after a faulty altimeter gauge forced an emergency landing shortly after the takeoff of a plane from Patraja. Though not the first incident since the launch of Patraja Air, it was one that was directly tied to hurried and stressed preparations by staff to be on time for takeoff.

From the company's founding in 2005 to its 2012 restructuring, all seemed well for Patraja Air, with minor incidents or accidents. Most notably for the airline, its built-in governmental security systems managed to stop a bomb threat aboard an aircraft in 2009 before it became a danger.

2012 Restructuring and Downscaling of Romain Marello's Leadership
In 2012, a year before Patraja Air would lose its entire monopoly on travel to, from, and within Patraja, the corporation received a major restructuring after years of technical woes. Although proficient in airline travel and working with available resources, the company was severely hurting from a lack of new technologies and airplanes. A particular incident in 2010, shortly after the discontinuation of the "zero wait time" rule, was emblematic of this, with a former engineer within the corporation complaining that the welding equipment given to repair crews were "from the 1970s, at best." The corporation was struggling to buy or improve any existing planes at all.Their newest model of airplane, the self-made Karneja 101, which launched in 2009, proved to be a financial and technical disaster that lost the corporation millions, and the government, reportedly, even more than that. The Karneja 101, with only one plane made in the line that served from 2009 to 2011, was riddled with outdated software, skimpy hardware, and a lack of proficient manual instruction or even international recognition. Famously, most international visits with Patraja Air refused to serve the 101 after months of its service, stating that faulty pump systems made the aircraft a danger to even fuel in their airports. Even with a famously-reviled aircraft designed under the corporation, Patraja Air struggled to acquire any recent foreign models, either. Other than the Karneja 101, their most recent airplane line was the Ekro'Vari-17, a privately-designed corporate plane created and released in 1993. Because of these technical woes, Patraja Air became known as a cheapskate option, even if it was the only option in the entire country, and entire protests formed against the organization, demanding even a return to the private airline system. In 2012, the Patraja Air Board of Directors stripped founder Romain Marello of some financial titles, and relegated him to merely a representative founder-chairman - a face of the company and a handler of its general areas, but not of its technical inner workings. Enraged, Marello reportedly threatened to approach the Senatorium to have the demotion overriden, but was instead reminded by the Congressional Bookkepers Office that the Congress had no such say in supervised corporate affairs. Marello accepted the demotion soon after, and has since served as a secondary face of the company.

Soon after the demotion, the Board elected Slavimir Dinatio as President and CEO, who immediately requested from the Senatorium an increase in funding, permission to sell several old planes, and further permission to purchase newer models. Along with that, Dinatio also used his own powers to restructure much of the company, firing essentially the entire middle management, which he later called "broken corpses of a corrupt system" in a 2018 interview, and replacing them with well-paid and newly-hired workers. Notably, the average age of management workers in the company went from 48 down to 37. After these actions, the Senatorium granted Dinatio all of his wishes. Across 2012 to 2013, airplanes were sold, repaired, replaced, and converted to more modern standards, whilst international relations were improved through special deals on different vacation areas.

The 2012 restructuring is seen these days, in essence, as a saving moment for Patraja Air, and a pivotal "decision point" for the corporation at a crossroads between competency and corruption. However, competition would soon test these self-supposed improvements a year after the restructuring.

2013 International Flights Amendment Act
The government, not in sync or in agreement with the restructure or eventual improvement of Patraja Air, began pursuing plans to reopen Patrajan airspace to foreign competition and corporate entry since, at least, 2009. In 2013, these efforts of generally middle-of-the-road anti-regulationist Assemblymen and Senators materialized into the International Flights Amendment Act, which aimed to, as its name suggested, amend the SNAR Act. The IFAA did not deny Patraja Air its monopoly over inner-national travel, or even travel outside of Patraja to other areas, but instead proposed allowing foreign airlines the ability to carry people into the country. In theory, the bill proposed and its representatives argued, the demand to enter Patraja from all international areas could never be filled by one airline, and that the national economic interest of getting as many tourists, spending immigrants, and other economic assets into the country far outweighed the national interest of having a smaller, mostly-domestic airline struggle to meet the demand.

Indeed, Patraja Air was considered by many international tourists as a "bottleneck" for entry into Patraja, with some waiting more than a month to even reserve tickets for an available flight. More economically-liberal peoples within the government also argued that, long-term, competition with Patraja Air would result in more profits stemming from foreign immigration and tourism towards the corporation, as more would be invested into the airline and more would be spent on a new focus on foreign markets. These talking points, publicized and used as reelection motifs due to the recent protests around Patraja Air, particularly excited domestic corporate and small local business interests.

With money-support and a seemingly rock-solid foundation of reason behind it, the IFAA passed both Congressional branches easily, and was signed into being by the President, set to begin taking effect in 2014. Once more, private and public airport authorities restructured, repainted, remade, and reprepared for the arrival of foreign airlines as business interests in their areas, using the given time of the bills implementation. In 2014, foreign flights began landing in Patraja, and economic effects were nearly immediate; tourism nearly tripled, foreign spending doubled, and immigration went up 3%. Along with that, land immigration decreased 2%, indicating a shift towards the air for immigration to Patraja, but a notable increase of a percentage or so overall. It was around this time that many coastal areas of Patraja began developing as tourist hotspots, such as the noted Saint Markos' Beaches, which are now the most profitable single provincial area in the country.

For his work on allowing Patraja Air to transition smoothly and elegantly towards both profit, new respect, and foreign competition, President and CEO Dinatio was awarded a governmental award in 2015, recognizing his contribution towards increased respect and fame for Patraja and its national services. However, soon after, in 2016, Dinatio resigned from the company, citing "further conflict with the governmental branches and entity within the corporation." In 2017, Dinatio joined the deregulationist party "Movement for Free Trade" and founded a cell service company that operates in the Province of Karneja named AirMobile.

2018 Rebranding
After a proven, decade-long track record of competency, Patraja Air sought a rebranding. The idea of rebranding the Patraja Air corporate brand was in the works since the 2012 restructuring, but was considered nothing else except essentially an act of desperation to get out under from public scrutiny. But with reviews and support at an all-time high, Patraja Air knew a successful rebrand would be taken well, and would mark a complete departure from the image of the state-assisted company as an artificial monopoly - an idea not entirely incorrect, but deeply-resented in the new corporate culture of Patraja Air. In early 2018, graphic designer Alexander Maxwell, a foreign designer known primarily for his work on car interiors and tech company logos, was hired by the company to redesign Patraja Air for the incoming 2020s. The current logo, after several revisions, was the result, and was announced and implemented on the same day on April 19th, 2018. The logo was received very well, with consumers and air travel critics calling it, notably, a "tasteful departure from the Junta-era sterility of the previous façade."

2024 Premium Flyer Program
In 2024, a Premium members package for Patraja Air was launched, named the Premium Flyer Program. This program, accessible only to those willing to pay a minor yearly fee and who had certain amounts of kilometers of flight under their wing, was launched to give primary access to first-class seats, opportunities, and newly-redesigned and built airport lounges. The program even promised the opportunity of reduced renting fees for smaller, individual private planes by 2030. Indeed, about three private planes were purchased by Patraja Air in preparation for the program the year prior, but would first need to be redesigned from the inside-out and rebuilt for a higher-class taste until later. The large, 6-year gap for such a simple operation was ridiculed by more serious flyers, businessmen, and investors, but the company privately stated that the actual deadline was somewhere closer to 2027, and that the initial date of 2030 was only given to assure more safety-concerned customer.

Controversies
Patraja Air has seen its fair share of controversies since its founding, and many such can be listed here, ranging from legitimate and semi-proven allegations to conspiracy theories.

Accusations of Corruption
Patraja Air has been accused of corporate corruption and unfair preferential treatment for tax treatments since its founding. The most credible of these accusations stems from the 2012 restructuring programs, which exposed, intentionally and not, many missing reports and claims that essentially added up to millions in missed taxes and payments to the government. However, the Patrajan Congress has since dismissed all of these repayments, stating that "Patraja Air has an allowance upon the confusion of its early years, but enforcement will tighten herein.

Controversy around Monopoly
Not as much an accusation as a controversy, Patraja Air has always been loathed by many for its legally-monopolized market share given to it by the state. Patraja Air, by its design, functions as the main airline of the country, but many still dislike this, and dozens of seats within both the Assembly and the Senatorium oppose its existence, and wish to allow foreign and domestic competition, along with releasing Patraja Air from its ties to the government.