With a recession on the way and the price of crude continuously climbing, the first people to stop flying will be the budget leisure travellers.
Yep, it's happened before. But it's the strong major locos who benefit and the legacy carriers who suffer. In previous times of recession (in the USA) it was SOUTHWEST Airlines which always continued to post a profit. What leisure pax they lost to recession was ballanced out by $ conscious corporate executives moving down from flying with the expensive legacy carriers.