Will;
What idiot worked his a** off to get people to think flying should be on a par with fast food ?? I look at fares over the last decade, and frankly, knowing what's at risk, it frightens me. It doesn't take a big brain to see where the offsets are.
Yup. It should frighten the flying public as well but when the focus is on a twenty dollar bill and not the larger picture, coming as it does from a flying public trained and raised on $1.49-fare-entitlement-or-else thinking, one's well-being and safety on an airplane is "assumed-or-else".
For such thinking you can thank Milton Friedman and the "Chicago Boys" from the University of Chicago and Ronald Reagan (he once said, "Not bad for an actor - four years' steady work") and his neoliberal deregulatory economics and the industry's response to same for the industry's mythologically-based fares.
Some of the early (viscerally hated by employees) responders were Carl Icahn and Bob "Fang" Crandall but the industry is littered with those men who saw the power resident in de-regulatory thinking and saw employee contracts as wealth-transferring ATM machines. The lever for such extractions was simple: Chapter 11.
GHOTI;
Thanks for putting reality to the imagined numbers - very interesting indeed. It puts meat on the theory but unfortunately the fatal accident rate, not any awareness of how much aviation costs to do safely and well, is the only factor that will alter the current turn upwards of a number of disconcerting trends.
There are far greater underlying factors at work here, wonderfully outlined in a book, (one of dozens), entitled, "Capital and Language". Sorry, off-thread but it is WELL worth reading. It's by an Italian author and not, thankfully, by an American observer/writer.