National airlines are facing severe competition from a new generation of cheaper rivals. By cutting their costs and offering cheap fares, budget airlines have caught up, and in some cases overtaken, national carriers in reputation and popularity. Overstaffed and inefficient national carriers find it hard to compete and regularly appoint new managers to turn them around. These new managers come up with ideas to turn the airlines into more efficient and competitive operations. Even so, they find it hard to stay ahead of the low-cost airlines. Just to break even is a tremendous struggle and they usually make enormous losses. Such rivalry is good for consumers, but price-cutting means that some well-known national carriers may not survive. They will become obsolete unless they switch to the practices of their low cost competitor. This will mean improving their competitiveness and diversifying into other services.