It is extraordinary to think how the two industries that transformed everyday life in the 20th Century are now in such terrible trouble.
There are huge losses in the US car industry, both among manufacturers and the companies that supply it, and vast pension liabilities as well.
Not to mention crippling burdens on airlines, an industry that traditionally loses in the bad times all the money it makes in the good ones.
Various factors contribute to the slow-motion writhings of these industries.
Airlines still fly in a super-regulated environment; safety, airport slots, elaborate international agreements about routes and reciprocal arrangements, and protectionism.
The stubbornness of the Goliaths of the business encourages entrepreneurial Davids to challenge the system on behalf of the ordinary passenger - see Laker, People's Express, Richard Branson, and Ryanair.
For a brief moment they make their wafer-thin margins from their nerveless opportunism, before Something Happens (a war, an oil crisis), and reality reasserts itself.
'Clumsy alliances'
Incumbent airlines bask in the security of being national champions, even if they are no longer government owned.
Hypnotised by the idea of one day being allowed to go genuinely global, they extend their routes in good times to feed passengers into the flights that pay and then have to retreat in alarm when the boom ends and business passengers stop flying, especially to second-rank places.
"One is tempted to come to the conclusion that perhaps capitalism cannot really cope with the needs of mass transportation"
They then dream up clumsy alliances to simulate global reach.
After 11 September, there was the extraordinary spectacle of the free-market American government dishing out billions to keep its airlines alive, with the curiosity of Chapter 11 (non) bankruptcy to keep the process of self-delusion going when the emergency aid ran out.
In the face of this drip-feeding, even more extraordinary was the way many non-subsidised competitors in Europe managed to recover profitability pretty quickly.
For a moment, anyway; this industry seems doomed never to make sustained profits. (But best not to mention sustainability and the airlines. No fuel duty is another huge subsidy that governments seem to keep putting off confronting.)
100 years ago
The demise of the American automobile industry is even more of a slow-motion crash, but it now seems to be happening before our eyes.
Talk to the barons of Detroit in their vast headquarters buildings and they hardly seem to register what is happening, so confident are they in the manufacturing methodology created by Henry Ford of that city 100 years ago.
Drive round the vast Rouge River Plant that Ford erected in 1920 and you will bump over the cobbles his men laid then; the blast furnaces that make the steel are named after his sons.
The tentacles of the past reach out and grab the minds of every recruit to the industry.
Walk round the show-business glitter of the Detroit Motor Show and the top men in the business (where are the women?) are still being reduced to small boys by the shiny vehicles they are selling.
They are still in awe of the annual model change, with which Alfred P Sloan of General Motors defeated the ultra conservative Ford in the 1930s.
If in doubt, the stylists seem to be saying, put fins back on.
Just-in-time
Meanwhile, year by year Toyota creeps closer and closer to toppling the American giants from their pre-eminence.
Its undisguised secret is a pursuit of quality - so thorough and so complete that even when they throw open their factories to visitors, the Japanese cannot be emulated when the visitors get back home to Detroit.
Yes, just-in-time production has reached round the world from its origins in Japan.
But what happens to most of the cars made in such a logistical triumph?
They are shipped into fields to lie about in all weathers awaiting the customers' orders generated by dealers' special offers.
Toyota's single-mindedness is easy to observe and very difficult indeed to copy.
Add a horror of waste to a real respect for what customers really want, and then turn that into a kind of corporate religion.
But most car companies (and their bosses) believe their own advertising; they live in a fantasy world.
Railway Bubble
In the US the big industry rituals are naked confrontations: auto and airline unions pick off one (profitable) company season by season; the strike for pay or conditions cripples both sides, and then the settlements have a longer-term crippling impact on the whole industry.
In Europe, who pays for health benefits and pension rights is more disguised. But the burden on ailing industries or economies is a similar one.
But maybe it is not quite as strange as it seems. One is tempted to come to the conclusion that perhaps capitalism cannot really cope with the needs of mass transportation.
After all, huge sums were lost in that previous great transformation, the Railway Bubble in the mid 19th Century.
But out of that we got the railway network. What will we get that is so lasting out of the great airline disaster? Or the death of the car (or the corporations that that make it)?
It's a curious business. Cars and airlines are Too Big to Fail, but far too big to succeed. As many other companies are going to discover as we motor further into the 21st Century.
Work in Progress is the title of this exploration of the big trends upheaving the world of work as we steam further into the 21st century; and it is a work in progress, influenced and defined by my encounters as I report on trends in business and organisations all over the world.
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