Originally Posted by
NEDude
You prioritized passengers over cargo...
No, you misunderstood. I was saying cargo pays about 50% per kg. than even low fare passengers. Yes, there is premium cargo, but only westbound, none eastbound. On the other hand passenger flow is pretty much balanced (most of those who go tend to also return, one-way is a minuscule component on longhaul). Simply put, there is no way a passenger airline can priorize cargo on a long Asian route without pissing off a lot of customers, and one mistreated passenger will put off another 100 from choosing that airline. Bad internal communication may have made matters worse for what was a bad choice in the first place.
Another thing is that it is a very tricky exercise to say whether this or that route made money or not. A large component of costs (around 30-35% on longhaul, higher on shorthaul) are allocated fixed costs that are spread based on some arbitrary measure (flight hours, seats, pax numbers, length of the chief purser's hair, whatever). Depending on the method used for the allocation of fixed costs and overheads, route profitablity changes dramatically, and it is the most common fallacy of inexperienced airline management to cut 'unprofitable' routes. That usually only results in the fixed costs being spread over a smaller base, making formerly 'profitable' routes unprofitable. Inversely, chasing growth it is easy to make more established routes profitable by adding loss making ones to spread the cost base. Overall, airline profitability can only be measured on a full network basis (that of course does not preclude measuring and ranking routes on a contribution basis, but even there connecting traffic, if it exists, muddies the picture), and I have yet to see numbers that support a low-fare model for longhaul operations.