"Bertie the Bunyip" wrote in message
...
"John Mazor"
:

I'm not disagreeing with your premises here, just amplifying on them.

"Jay Honeck" wrote in message
news:rY4We.351954$xm3.256217@attbi_s21...
Anyway, it seems like some more consolidation among the majors will
be needed in the future. There isn't really a need for more than
three major airlines, probably AA, DL (merged with CO and NW), and
UA (merged with US).

Absolutely. The reason the airlines are in this mess is because
Congress refuses to let any major airline FAIL.

Well, there is the minor matter that until the US Airways/America West
merger, the administration also refused to allow mergers. Mergers
provide a rational, orderly reduction of capacity. Bankruptcy is a
weapon of mass destruction if reducing excess capacity is your goal.

Unfortunately, that's what capitalism requires for success. In a
truly
free market,

...the government would have been open to proposals for mergers.

the surviving airlines would feed on the carcass of a truly bankrupt
airline, plucking the profitable routes and leaving the deadwood
behind.

That already happens. You don't need bankruptcy for that.

In our current dream-world of "protected deregulation", Congress
keeps bailing out failing airlines, allowing them to continue
operating at below-profitable levels

That goes all the way back to the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978,
where Congress hedged its bets by providing "Essential Air Service"
subsidies. The problem has been that Congress and consumers want it
both ways - competition resulting in cheaper fares, while maintaining
the expectation of service levels that were possible under regulated
pricing.

-- which means they can continue to charge less than
what it really costs to fly the routes, which, in turn, means that
NONE of the airlines can charge what it actually costs to fly.

True as far as it goes, but there are other factors that have undercut
airlines' ability to set pricing or clear a profit, such as Internet
fare shopping (which the airlines foolishly embraced at first), the
rising cost of oil (even the carriers in bankruptcy would have had
operating profits except for rising fuel prices), the way that the
government has treated airlines as a cash cow (the taxes on a typical
airline ticket are higher than the "sin taxes" on alcohol and
tobacco).

The irony here is that allowing airlines to go into bankruptcy allows
them a competitive edge over solvent carriers. The solution is to
reduce the period for management to have exclusionary control over the
enterprise, and not allow a bankrupt carrier to expand operations.

Until the Feds let Northworst and Delta fail, this situation will
continue
to get worse.

That's one solution, but not the only one. There are more rational
approaches to the capacity problem.

Best solution is to limit it to the types of people that used to fly.
People that needed to. People that could afford to. People with class.
Bring back the DC-7, I say.

Oh wait, wrong problem.

Bring back the Connie. Now THERE was an airplane to fly in.

As to the pax, a simple literacy test would filter out the worst of the
riff-raff.