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Originally Posted by Rodney
That's another way of saying, "People can't easily afford the fares that airlines require to run a safe and effective business."
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Yeah, that's pretty much what I meant.
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Which means that, as good and responsible capitalists, the airlines should either come up with new and better ideas that allow them to prosper by offering safe and efficient service at a reasonable price. Or go out of business and be replaced by something that can do it better.
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Easier said than done. You think airline managers aren't trying to figure out ways to become profitable again? Many industry folks think that the airline industry is still in a shake-down period from dereg. Nobody has come up with any better solutions, and the legacy airlines refuse to die; so it's still the same old cycle of new airlines cropping up and then going broke, and the old airlines filing for bankruptcy every so often.
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the airlines will probably 1) try to slip by offering with substandard maintenance until they're called on it, and 2) ask Uncle Sugar to bail them out, like before.
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The FAA and NTSB have recognized the danger of airlines pinching pennies so they have stringent safety regulations. But still, things are going to keep slipping by, especially with most aircraft flying nowadays being decades old.
Obviously nobody knows how to solve the problem with the airlines, because nothing has changed yet. The new low cost carriers are eking out a profit, but even then it's not much. The airlines are going to have trouble finding quality pilots in the future also, since the new pay scales put the maximum wages at like $100K. Not many people are going to be willing to incur tens of thousands of dollars of debt just to get a job that pays $20k/year in the beginning and $100k/year at the end.