Who's to blame?? What kind of question is that?

The headline on MSNBC this morning, after the news of IKE and our stock market going to take a huge nose dive, was "Who is to Blame for the Outrageous Airline Ticket Prices?" I was so shocked, that I almost didn't believe what I heard. I mean, the Airline Industry is the only one that I can think of that more or less looses money on every passenger. The ticket prices do not cover the price of fuel alone. Not taking into account the numerous other costs that airlines face.

You look at the planes that I fly, on our 86 seat aircraft, at current ticket prices, we have to have 81 people on board to cover just the cost of fuel, and then there is the aircraft leasing cost, maintance, crew costs, etc. Our two smaller aricraft (66 and 50 passengers) cannot make money even fully loaded. The avergae gallon on Jet A (the fuel we use) is over $7.00 a gallon. We burn on average 3000 lbs AN HOUR. On a two hour flight, that is $4,200 in fuel alone.

So who is to blame for the higher prices? The real questions is, what are we going to do when every airline is bankrupt? We complain about the prices at the fuel pumps, but we all still pay. Airlines are going to have to drastically raise their fares to survive. The bottom line is flying is not going to be affordable to everyone until the fuel prices come back under control. Airlines cannot continue to lose money, or a lot of people (including me) will not have a plane to fly much longer :-(