Five reasons why air travel is so expensive right now

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

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

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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.”

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

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

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Well, better for the planet.

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

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

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?

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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.

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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.

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