> From its deregulation in 1978 to the end of 2025, the airline industry has cumulatively lost money: its net profit over those 47 years sits at negative $37 billion.

That was surprising. Goes against the idea that deregulation allows companies to squeeze consumers and earn excess profits. My understanding is that before regulation, routes were allotted by the government. So an airline might own New York to Boston, so they didn't have to compete. Obviously de-regulation changed that.

The article doesn't go into it, but unions are also a challenge. Much of the airline industry is unionized. So you have situations where pilots that have been there a while get a lot more money. You have people doing essentially the same job but some are getting paid 3x as much just because they've been there a long time. In most industries, there is higher pay for senior talent, but that's because they're more effective at their job, and produce higher output. In this case it's just a legacy cost that makes some airlines incredibly uncompetitive through structural features.

https://www.thrustflight.com/united-airlines-pilot-salary/

A race to the bottom on pilot pay won't help anything. Well it may lead to less qualified pilots. You can ask Boeing how well screwing over labor has worked for them if you like.

All US airlines have the same labor costs for pilots and it isn't their highest cost anyway. That would be fuel.

If you want to divvy up costs that way: Boeing is probably the biggest problem. Both them and Airbus eat up all possible excess profit on the back end via the cost for airliners. Break up Boeing, bring back competition in airliner manufacturing. People who want to screw over labor don't usually frame things in those terms for some reason.

> was surprising. Goes against the idea that deregulation allows companies to squeeze consumers and earn excess profits.

That's because this assertion is economically illiterate. Deregulation can lead to increased profits where otherwise companies have monopoly power. But often, the regulation was there in the first place to ensure that companies had sufficient profit to invest in expensive infrastructure. (E.g. railroads).

> That was surprising. Goes against the idea that deregulation allows companies to squeeze consumers and earn excess profits

Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't. It depends on the industry, as the article goes into detail to explain.