Funny, I thought ( and so did a court in NY that awarded shed loads of damages to FL) that laker was dun in by a combination of dirty tricks and preditory pricing by BA (this was just a warm up for what was to come), Pan Am et al. Dosen't the story go that on advice from BA Barclays (who were financing Laker's D10s) pulled the plug and stuffed the airline or something like that?.
While conventional wisdom has it that there "ain't no way a low fare long haul airline could work". Of course, this is the same conventional wisdom that said a Southwest style low fare airline could never work in the high cost European environment. Yep got that one right...let's hear it for conventional wisdom
True, the higher utilisation benefits are not going to be there but that is just part of the low fare matrix - the incremental reduction in costs could come from a variety of cost centres.
Take cost of ownership - you can get some pretty good A340-200 deals right now and come to that there are more than a few 744s going cheap about the place. Equally, massive savings are to be had in the back office operation (always a crippler for legacy airlines) and other non-core operations.
Think Jet Blue - which operates sucessfully a number of coast-to -coast services which are getting on for long haul in stage length - they won't be geeting much more in utiliastion than their leagcy competitors so they're getting the margin from somewhere.
Nope I think it's only a matter of time before somebody figures out a way to do it and make a bunch of money.
