We also have to look at the changes in the airline market itself. It really is no exaggeration to say that the salad days are over. Low-costs in Europe have all but killed the notion of national airlines within the EU (or will do so soon). Passengers are wise to the fact that, over the course of a seventy minute sector, the full-service carriers service wasn't really all that different (Air Miles excepted) and subsequently they are increasingly going low cost wherever possible.
At the same time, the downturn in business post 9/11 has accelerated the process of restructuring in the aviation market with sickly majors going to wall left, right and centre and freeing up slots at the major airports, access to which was their last shred of competitive advantage in the battle with the low-costs. Passengers might have baulked at the flying Stansted-Beauvais with Ryanair but LGW-ORY will do nicely. The airports, having invested massively in turning themselves into oversized shopping malls will have to keep people coming through the gates so the slots will need to be filled and in the absence of the nationals the low-costs will have to fill them and the airports will take whatever revenue they can get.
The long-haul market will be interesting to watch. Personally, I used to wonder how the numbers would look for smaller twin-jets flying all "C" or "F" class on the Atlantic with extremely high flexibility and leaving the big cattle trucks to fly less frequently but full of economy pax paying un-discounted fares. This was a few years ago and it seemed a little outlandish at the time but now we see Lufthansa experimenting with all "C" class BBJs flying the Atlantic. For people willing to pay biz class the benefits of a smaller aircraft are clear. They won't have to hang about for four hundred "proles" to get on their plane so their check-in times can be reduced, boarding and deplaning takes no time and the cost is not significantly different (since these people generally don't pay the fares anyway a difference of 5 or 10% might not be considered the end of the world).
Equally, the benefits for the airlines are clear. They could maintain reasonable frequency for business travel without having the burden of filling two or three hundred economy seats on those flights which has the undesirable consequence of causing a glut of economy seats meaning they must be sold at cost or less to fill them. In other words, the big iron would fly less.
Again, these are just fun theories to chuck about but I think they add up to aviation being a much less fun business to be in in the future, which goes some way to explaining why I quit aviation and am in the last few weeks of my MBA. I intend to do my flying at the weekends in a Yak!