Folks, the real problem is the Airline Business as we know it today is broken. With almost every carrier in financial distress, seeking concessions, cutting flights, routes, employees, planes and whatever else they can think, it has to go deeper then just soft travel demand from September 11th.
You can look at history, employees at Pan Am, Eastern, TWA and numerous others have given concessions to their respective companies and they still went out of business or were sold off. Concessions have never saved an airline yet.
The way they do business is the problem, if you can't sell a ticket for the price it costs you to fly the airplane, the business model is broken.
I am not one for pitching reregulation, but it is either reregulate or survival of the fittest. Because when you have upstarts like JetBlue that do not have the overhead and facilities (example, JetBlue pays a reservationist $8 an hour to take calls at home for reservation, therefore they have no building to maintain)of established major airlines it puts them at a cost advantage, somewhat like Valujet was in regards to a virtual airline, outsourcing work to the lowest bidder, in life I have always been a firm believer of you get what you pay for.
The airlines, unions, employees and the government must sit down and come up with something that will fix the industry, not put a band-aid on a gushing wound.
You can look at history, employees at Pan Am, Eastern, TWA and numerous others have given concessions to their respective companies and they still went out of business or were sold off. Concessions have never saved an airline yet.
The way they do business is the problem, if you can't sell a ticket for the price it costs you to fly the airplane, the business model is broken.
I am not one for pitching reregulation, but it is either reregulate or survival of the fittest. Because when you have upstarts like JetBlue that do not have the overhead and facilities (example, JetBlue pays a reservationist $8 an hour to take calls at home for reservation, therefore they have no building to maintain)of established major airlines it puts them at a cost advantage, somewhat like Valujet was in regards to a virtual airline, outsourcing work to the lowest bidder, in life I have always been a firm believer of you get what you pay for.
The airlines, unions, employees and the government must sit down and come up with something that will fix the industry, not put a band-aid on a gushing wound.