surplus1;
Times have changed.
Regarding Caddy's, a month's salary, and "lo-cost", permit me a little drift for a thought experiment:
A 1958 schedule from an airline advertised fares from western Canada to Europe at about "$780" in 1958 dollars, one-way. Today, you can do the same for about $380 2009 dollars or less than $40 1958 dollars. Both technology and inflation are at work here.
Through design efficiencies, (wing & engine), the microchip and safety advances dramatically reducing the traditional causes of accidents such as mechanical failure, weather, navigation, avionics, runway design, and to a great extent, human factors, the industry has kept and even lowered the "numerical" charge for a seat on the safest transportation system in the world.
This fact is invisible to "what have you done for us lately?" thinking. Turn-around, tight scheduling "makes" more airplanes without buying more but such a system can break down during IRROPS. Staffing is bare-bones and the neoliberal economy has created The New Serfdom out of employees who at one time were actually loyal to their company...for life.
If we used the same numbers for the auto industry, your 1958 "$5500" Cadillac (or $7750 for a limited edition Eldorado Convertible) would today cost about $400.
Today we pay five-figures for a car and think nothing of it while a twenty-dollar difference in an air fare or a grouchy flight attendant on his or her sixth or seventh leg of the day, or no blankie and no peanuts drives passengers to the complaint department, the earliest part of our triune brain fully engaged.
We wait fifteen minutes in line at Starbucks or whatever for our designer coffee or 30 minutes for a fine dinner but a visceral sense of entitlement bubbles to the surface from the cauldron of institutionalized impatience at an airport if our flight is delayed for the same amount of time because of weather or a mechanical, our ticket bought for the price of a hundred west-coast lattes or a night and a half in most hotels.
Airlines are not without serious faults but the flying public has the airline system it wants and has demanded. Airlines are complicitous in the "low-cost" mantra by convincing the flying public that aviation can be done for such fares. It can't.
Since it began nearly a hundred years ago, this industry has consistently charged less for its services than it costs them. That means there is something other than profit that drives individuals into aviation but that is another thread for another day. The very old story on how to become a millionaire is, start with a billion dollars and then buy and run an airline.
A 1958 Flight magazine states how difficult it is to make a profit even with US taxpayer subsidies and heavy regulatory route approvals and interventions. The CAB and IATA had teeth and at least the industry was stable compared to today. Employees have no idea how bad they really have it and passengers have no idea how good they have it in terms of price, which is, it seems, all they think about when it comes time to put their cash down, largely oblivious to the twin, oppositional effects of de-regulation and the aviation improvements described above which make their trip possible for "a dollar forty-nine", one way.
Things have changed indeed since you and I and many others left
Aviation can be done "lo-cost", but not forever. Despite reliability and a spectacular safety record, the industry is a "bricks and mortar" one and cannot be done "virtually". People need training, airplanes need maintenance and investors need a reasonable return. It isn't complicated, nor are the outcomes of parsimony difficult to comprehend. Its the next oldest story in aviation.
Though it's the same all over for all employees as well as owners and shareholders, this industry cannot continue to nickel-and-dime those who do the work and expect that flight safety levels will remain the same. But flight safety is the elephant in the living room and this industry doesn't want to talk about it.