Airline Business editor Richard Whitaker learned from his mistakes when he helped run an airline for four years. But the shareholders were not pleased with the result.

,We saw it coming . . . We took too long to do anything . . . We turned it around . . . Good job it wasn't our money.'

Those remarks came from one of our competitors after four years of financial mayhem. And our airline's performance was worse than his. Writing about running an airline is the easiest thing in the world. Actually running one is another story altogether. I had always suspected this but recently had a chance to prove it conclusively. Of course our airline wasn't real. It was a simulation game developed by Lufthansa Consulting as a training tool for airline managers who need to know - well how to manage an airline.

The necessary ingredients are as follows.

You have three teams of five people each. Each team starts with an identical airline. The three airlines have been operating in a regulated market with traffic and revenues split equally among them. Their financial performance has been identical. However at the start of the game the airlines have been privatised and the industry has been deregulated. Each airline now has complete freedom to make decisions on frequencies fares marketing policies fleet and so forth. And each airline has a share price whose level is determined by the market's view of its performance.

This may sound familiar to some people in the real world. It's about to get more familiar. The instructors running the course have the ability to simulate very accurately the effects of hideous external events like recession terrorist attacks see-sawing exchange rates plagues of locusts and just about anything else you can imagine.

And they have a nasty habit of injecting something unpleasant just as you think you have control of whatever difficult situation they last presented you with. Just like real life really. Of course some things have to be simplified to make the game work. You are not allowed to launch new routes because the intention is to make you compete vigorously on the four routes you started with (although you can withdraw from markets). There is no provision for complex issues such as traffic feeding across the hub or codesharing alliances with other carriers. And there are no face-to-face negotiations with labour groups although labour unrest is simulated. But most of the day-to-day activities of running an airline are simulated with sufficient accuracy for the exercise to be worthwhile.