Five reasons why air travel is so expensive right now

[frauenfelder]

Originally published at: Five reasons why air travel is so expensive right now | Boing Boing

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[MrShiv]

According to Patrick Smith, author of Cockpit Confidential and the “Ask the Pilot” blog, very few pilots actually lost their jobs during the pandemic.

[gracchus]

Stephen Tracy, chief operating officer at Milieu Insight, a Singapore-based consumer insight and analytics firm. He said, “The rise in prices is a short-term phenomenon. Let’s all just hope that once these things equalize again, the prices come back down. I am fairly confident that they will.”

He should change the name of his firm to “Sweet Summer Child Insights.”

[RickMycroft]

@frauenfelder

the airlines are eager to “repair balance sheets” by jacking up prices.

To get back the money that was stolen from them. It’s only justified. /s

[Akimbo_NOT]

Billions received in COVID relief money and they are still ripping people off.

[jeddak]

Well, better for the planet.

[ficuswhisperer]

@frauenfelder

1. Airlines reduced their fleets during pandemic lockdowns and are “cautious about bringing back all their idled jets.”

2. Jet fuel has gotten a lot more expensive. “Spot jet fuel prices in New York have soared more than 80% this year,” and the airlines are passing along the extra cost to their passengers.

They found they can pack more people into fewer flights, and fuller flights use more fuel

3. People are willing to shell out extra money for the high-priced tickets. “Some consumers are tapping dormant holiday budgets and upgrading to more expensive aircraft cabins for leisure trips.”

And they make planes more uncomfortable making it easier to justify spending extra for slightly less shitty economy seats.

4. Airlines fired “hundreds of thousands of pilots, flight attendants, ground handlers and other aviation workers” during the pandemic and now they are having a hard time re-staffing.

5. After losing $200 billion during the pandemic, the airlines are eager to “repair balance sheets” by jacking up prices.

Didn’t they get tens of billions of dollars in stimulus money? Where did it all go? And of course they are having a hard time re-hiring. Who wants to go back to the company that fired them unnecessarily?

[AlexG55]

Cargo planes need pilots but not cabin crew- the figures might look quite different for them.

(I wonder if passenger airlines ran cargo flights using passenger planes with the seats empty, and therefore no cabin crew)

Certainly there were a lot of furloughed cabin crew in the UK- they were administering vaccinations during the early part of the UK’s vaccination programme, as they have the required interpersonal skills and medical training, and were otherwise unemployed.

[fiatrn]

@ficuswhisperer

They found they can pack more people into fewer flights, and fuller flights use more fuel

But they use less fuel per person, so a net positive for the environment.

@AlexG55 - (I wonder if passenger airlines ran cargo flights using passenger planes with the seats empty, and therefore no cabin crew)

According to my friend who flies for American, they did exactly that. He actually got to fly planeloads of vaccine from Germany back to the US.