A more fair assessment would be: company runs a utility => they need to be a regulated utility!

The core part of air travel doesn’t really feel any different to a bus or metro or train. Off the tarmac then yes it absolutely feels like a Verizon store, as does some of the in-flight service, but there’s always been this weird feeling as a traveler that every carrier is basically the same thing but with different decals on it. Airline alliances are surely the ultimate example of this.

Meanwhile, first class today is not very much more than coach cost in the regulated era.

Try flying Delta. It isn’t the cheapest option, but you really do get better service.

If you want to feel special, do Aeromexico first class. The checked bags are waiting for you before you can even walk there on a domestic flight.

Spirit was cheap. And if you’re poor, you need cheap. If you aren’t, buy better service and don’t complain that it’s just Greyhound on a plane.

Company, always: "We need government subsidy". Then hell yes to regulating what they do.

I like the EU model. The regulators set a "bare minimum" set of requirements. They have much better minimums that North America, and the fares are (still) cheaper per kilometer travelled. Also, I love the penalty system when flights are late.

Even with your uncharitable framing I agree with both quotes.

Company is valuable to us as a society in a fundamental way but is fucking us up in all sorts of unique ways: They might need to be a regulated utility.

Okay, but the process of underwriting an airline now somehow involves operating a successful credit card company. Which, you know, are not typically successful based upon operating excellence but upon rapaciousness of interest rates and merchant fees.

I'm not sure it's great to have important infrastructure operated this way. Other than regulation do you see a way out?

> Because the amount anyone would actually pay is substantially below cost for most routes

This is absolutely not true. If all the airlines were prohibited from making money with anything else (miles, credit cards) then airfares would rise across the board and there would still be plenty of demand. Not as much, but still plenty.

If airlines didn’t exist, people and goods would continue to move around the globe as they have done for thousands of years. There’s nothing magical about air travel (or any other transport mode) that makes it worthy of subsidy .

> the amount anyone would actually pay is [...]

That's.... like a pretty shocking erasure of the idea of a demand curve given the forum here.

To be glib: no, that's not how it works. Increase the price and fewer people will fly, but the demand won't drop to zero. Decrease it and you make less money per ticket but the size of the market is bigger. At some point there is a local maximum, to which the market seeks.

But conditions change occasionally and the equivalent supply curve is moving rapidly because of the oil shock (i.e. it's more expensive to put planes in the air to service tickets you already sold). And things like the mess with Spirit are what happens when the market readjusts: the rest of the industry will (probably) backfill some of the lost capacity, but not all of it, and prices will (probably) rise a bit to a new equilibrium.

Now you have to option to pay as much as you used to (inflation adjusted) for a ticket, and get first class service with all the leg room you want.

"Yes, tickets used to cost a bit more"

Tickets used to cost 4-8x what they cost now, depending on route. It wasn't a couple percent extra. A lot of what made flying seem like such a glamorous activity was that everyone but the upper classes was excluded.

An economy class round trip from the US to Japan in the 1970s with Pan-Am was $8,900 in 2026 dollars. About $15,000 if you flew first class.

It would be prohibitively expensive for poor people to fly. I understand why you wouldn’t care about that, but some people are poor and still need to fly if you can believe it.

Was that Flightfox? If so, I loved using it, helped me save so much money but also time :)

It sounds like there’s a problem with having too many flights that are barely full and hence unprofitable. AFAIK the federal gov spends significant money subsidising many “small airport” routes even if they’re barely used.

Yup, and this is exacerbated by how services like Google Flights work. There's little visibility into any kind of "quality" metric, but prices are always front and center. So why would you optimize based on anything else?

A huge number of businesses survive on whales, it's becoming really apparent. I'm kinda surprised how common it is.

I wonder if this will be the next "market" to exploit if ad revenue ever dies down too much, or if it's one that's always been there, and I've simply never been a part of.

This isn't true. European airlines do have loyalty programs with "miles".

Air France, British Airways, Finnair, Turkish Airlines, just to name a few, all have miles programs.

They just aren't tied to credit cards because the EU caps interchange fees to 0.3%, so there simply isn't enough money to have a meaningful credit card point system.

Their last earnings report says about 17B in non-cash assets with about 848M in profit based on those assets (assuming that the quarterly profit x 4 is a reasonable assumption). So where are your numbers from?

Wow… at 1.5% annual return wouldn’t they be better off just renting those assets (aircraft) to other airlines?!

Corporate bonds won't take you to Disneyland.

The comments here seem to suggest that the loyalty program funded with credit card margins are to blame for the difference.

It suggests we'd be better of eliminating the absurdly high hidden taxes paid to the credit card companies, that in turn act to gamify the business. In the end they raise the cost of doing business, for virtually no benefit at all. It's a monopoly extracting as much wealth they can get away with.

The question at the heart of this: How can "the shining light on a hill" be so stupid? It's digging its own demise.

This is a textbook case of competition pushing profits down to 0. That's an ideal case scenario. Why would you want to change this?

"Perfect efficiency comes at the point of collapse"

Don't know where I read that, but it seems apropos.

Good? It’s dirt cheap