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Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that more because air traffic is up rather than their margins having gone up? Maybe oil prices of the day play a role too...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that more because air traffic is up rather than their margins having gone up? Maybe oil prices of the day play a role too... but I wouldn't count on that to be true for long. Even in this report though, you'll note that the fares are down 63% since 1995 - the competition is pretty fierce here. The absolute profit is only around measured 5% even today. I wouldn't exactly call that a great margin.

jessaustin 9y ago
The absolute profit is only around measured 5% even today. I wouldn't exactly call that a great margin. You would if you were a grocer. Deregulated airlines have low margins; that's a fact of life. They pay fuel bills, they pay interest, the executives steal what they can, and the unions take everything else. When they miscalculate and pay the unions so much they can't cover their bonds, they reorganize through bankruptcy. None of this is new, and none of this justifies racist violence.
- problems 9y ago
  I did not suggest this justifies anything - in fact I said this was severely mishandled. I merely tried to explain the slight against overbooking some people seem to have - which is mostly unrelated entirely, but that's why I didn't respond to the top post, but to a post complaining about the practice of overbooking. Though I don't see anything that makes me think this was a racist act, where'd you get that idea?
  - jessaustin 9y ago
    Sorry I thought you were talking about airline profits, and offering an opinion about them. I disagree with the opinion I thought you offered, because every deregulated airline in existence has similar or worse margins, nearly all the time. Somehow most of them have been able to avoid both brutalizing their passengers and United-level overbooking. It's racist because a small middle-aged Chinese physician was forcibly removed. There's no way they would have removed a middle-aged white physician. Likewise, even the big tough airline security asshole who assaulted the physician would have hesitated to forcibly remove someone his own size or larger. This passenger was someone he could handle the way he would handle a child or a woman, without suffering the same legal repercussions that handling a child or woman in that fashion would entail. Yes, I know there are reports of using a "random computer" to select this passenger. That's what's known in the airline industry as "lying" and in the media industry as "we like to copy and paste press releases".

jessaustin 9y ago

The absolute profit is only around measured 5% even today. I wouldn't exactly call that a great margin. You would if you were a grocer. Deregulated airlines have low margins; that's a fact of life. They pay fuel bills, they pay interest, the executives steal what they can, and the unions take everything else. When they miscalculate and pay the unions so much they can't cover their bonds, they reorganize through bankruptcy. None of this is new, and none of this justifies racist violence.

problems 9y ago
I did not suggest this justifies anything - in fact I said this was severely mishandled. I merely tried to explain the slight against overbooking some people seem to have - which is mostly unrelated entirely, but that's why I didn't respond to the top post, but to a post complaining about the practice of overbooking. Though I don't see anything that makes me think this was a racist act, where'd you get that idea?
- jessaustin 9y ago
  Sorry I thought you were talking about airline profits, and offering an opinion about them. I disagree with the opinion I thought you offered, because every deregulated airline in existence has similar or worse margins, nearly all the time. Somehow most of them have been able to avoid both brutalizing their passengers and United-level overbooking. It's racist because a small middle-aged Chinese physician was forcibly removed. There's no way they would have removed a middle-aged white physician. Likewise, even the big tough airline security asshole who assaulted the physician would have hesitated to forcibly remove someone his own size or larger. This passenger was someone he could handle the way he would handle a child or a woman, without suffering the same legal repercussions that handling a child or woman in that fashion would entail. Yes, I know there are reports of using a "random computer" to select this passenger. That's what's known in the airline industry as "lying" and in the media industry as "we like to copy and paste press releases".