Originally Posted by
Hartington
I think that helps to concentrate a few airline minds and probably reduces the number of cancellations for commercial reasons.
Your statement assumes that airlines, in the past, regularly cancelled flights for economic reasons and they do so less often now. However you don't support your assumption any with empirical evidence.
But, as I noted above, a study done by expensive outside consultants for the EU failed to find any change in the rate of cancellations before/after the punitive compensation amounts were implemented. This suggests that airlines did not cancel for economic reasons in the past, and do not do so today.
(I recognise that an airline in serious economic difficulty, about to go bust, could take such measures. But this would be the exception rather than the rule.)