Posted on 06/16/2008 6:19:08 AM PDT by chessplayer
You are quite welcome. Your response confirms my nomination.
I nominate this post as the dumbest one on the thread.
Au contraire! D-Man has it exactly right. The buck stops with those at the top.
I learned a simple, yet powerful, creed when I was a young Air Defense Artillery Platoon Leader: everything that my unit does or fails to do is my responsibility.
If only our "Captains of Industry" would follow the credo of every unit leader in our military.
They don’t travel?
And the problem is that the field of competition is not level. Our airlines must compete against government subsidized national airlines plus abide by USG regulations.
A rational criticism of my post might be that it is so obvious that it didn’t need to be said. But the guy who reponded to it show that maybe it did need to be said.
Would you like to expand on your comment? Top management is not supposed to find ways to overcome problems?
From the article:
“In better economic times, a gap in service left by the failure of one airline would be immediately be filled by another. With so many airlines struggling under the weight of escalating fuel costs, however, “You can no longer expect immediate backfill [of those flights],” Mr. Mitchell said.
As a result, airline service will be even less reliable, according to the study, and any conveniences afforded to business travelers would suffer. “
Without some kind of drastic action (akin to marching into Saudi Arabia and assuming control and pricing of production ourselves), I don’t see petroleum prices coming back down. If anything, they may continue to creep upwards.
Nor do I see the airline industry surviving in its present form. Commericial aircraft gobbles fuel at too high a rate for airlines to absorb the costs yet still be able to operate profitably under their current business model, which is to provide air transportation to the masses.
Until the 1960’s, air travel was prohibitively expensive for anyone other than business travelers with expense accounts, and the well-heeled. Most middle- and working-class folk didn’t fly, except in extraordinary circumstances.
That changed, ushered in by an era of cheap fuel and big planes. Remember “People Express”? I remember flying from Newark to Oakland for $88 back in 1980.
What I expect to see is the collapse of “air transportation for the masses” and a return to the model of the 1950’s: a much smaller core of commercial airlines, providing [compared to today] limited service to major cities at prices affordable only to the upper echelons or business travelers.
ASIDE:
This is why passenger railroading collapsed starting in the 1950’s - the costs of operating the service began to outrun the fares that could be charged that would attract sufficient ridership to keep the services running. It’s also why Amtrak continually operates at a loss - the costs of assembling, maintaining and operating a fleet of equipment, properly staffed, exceed the revenues that can be reasonably charged in order to attract ridership. Even in the heavily-traveled Northeast Corridor, passenger revenues alone cannot sustain the service.
The rising cost of fuel is going to do to the airlines, what the emergence of low-cost air transportation did to the railroads.
One thing seems certain - by 2015, commercial air travel will be much-changed from what it is today.
- John
Sounds like a global govt sort of thing.
It is not a level playing field. To blame mismangagement as the reason why the airlines are going bankrupt fails to acknowledge some basic issues like rising fuel costs, USG mandates in terms of route allocation, etc. All of our major airlines are having problems. Many have already gone under or merged.
I haven’t flown in a plane in years. I have to fly into San Luis Obispo in a Saab 340 Turboprop. What are those like to fly in?
They have raised them a lot. Check one back $10.00, 2nd Bag 25.00. Want a coke 2.00 want to use the restroom on the plane free but $5.00 to exit the restroom. Have to slide your credit card in the slot to get out.
They can only address those under their control. Do you blame "Big Oil" for not increasing domestic supplies of oil? Is it the airlines fault that the US has the second highest corporate tax rates in the world? Or that the USG requires airlines to take on non-profitable routes in return for other routes? There is a reason why US airlines across the board are having a difficult time along with many other international airlines.
When you have increasing operating costs, you eventually have to pass those on to the consumer, which has the effect of decreasing passenger traffic. You still have to fly the entire plane, loaded or not. And the USG requires you to fly certain routes regardless of their profitability.
I don’t know the particulars of the Saab, but I like turboprops. You get to fly lower to the ground and see more of the ground from the windows. They aren’t much fun in bad weather, because they don’t fly high enough to avoid it.
I think he found you statement a bit ironic.
The way a company finds and keeps "good management" is to give them the big paychecks. This is not to say, however, that everyone who gets a big paycheck is good management.
Thanks for the info. I hope the weather will be nice!
And what meaning does this have in regards to the other discussion?
Every US airline ticket comes with the exciting possibility of:
Overflowing toilets, rude stewardesses, hostile TSA gorillas, aircraft confinement, smelly passengers, cabin germs, muslim terrorists, flight delays, indifferent customer service, etc...
How I yearn to go back to Frank Sinatra's flying days...
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