Because our customers refuse to pay as much for our products as they did in the past.
As sympathetic one can be towards this argument, before it can happen there
must be someone offering cheaper products!
The LCCs do so, agreed. But what mainly happened is that to continue generating a slight profit for the sleezy managers, someone had to give up something, someone had to pay the difference between real cost and the too low prices.
It is easy to see that two groups are bleeding for that:
- the employees, mainly pilots who saw their T&Cs eroding dramatically
- the tax payer through subsidies. Mainly on airport fees, but also through heavily underpriced, therefore subsidised aircraft to "save" jobs and politicians elections ....
So the SLFs insulting the pilots on this thread should think twice, or should simply start thinking about how expensive their LCC prices REALLY are, considering everything .....
This would then point the blame to the right direction!
But to ask someone to look for the big picture and to engage his brain seems a lost cause nowadays.