Congrats AA/AMR ...
This excerpt I find astonishing ...
During the second quarter, the Company paid $434 million more for fuel than it would have paid with last year's fuel prices.
End of quote ...
The frustrating part for the pilot group is we can provide concessions (hourly pay, benefits, Rigs ...) and it can all be erased with a volatile week in the commodities pit. Talk about having the unconstrained variables be the dominant ones in the competitive pricing model !
I'm curious what my brethren think of the current fare increases ...
In other words, for those ECON majors ... what is the price elasticity of demand in the (1) point to point markets served by a low-cost provider and a legacy carrier (an example might be LAX-SEA or MCO-BWI) ? (2) Are the low-cost carriers trying to bleed the legacy carriers with marginal profit pricing models ?
(3) Are the shareholders of the SWA, Air Tran's, Jet Blue betting that they will win the war of attrition ?
This is the worst I have seen our industry in nearly 20 years ...
I am particularly stumped why the fundamentals in the commodity market having taken a far backseat to emotion, fear and 'illogical exuberance' (I think I got this right ... Fed Chairman Greenspan ... some years ago talking about the tech bubble). I understand the China factor ... but I also look at the supply side of crude (even taking into account the 'possible' refining bottleneck theories and am completely dumbfounded by the escalation of crude. Two weeks ago the price of sweet crude jumped $1.89 in one hour because of a weather forecast (concerning Emily) that by its own admission was tentative at best ... Maybe the new market will be dominated by emotion rather than historical fundamentals ... maybe not.... which I knew because I could make a boatload of $$$ without hearing the TA/RA alerts going into LAX
Whatever the outcome (1 to 2 years) in the oil markets ... if history repeats itself and the price of oil does move our country to alternative means of surface transport (hybrids, ethanol ... etc) ... OPEC is going to experience a collapse of unimaginable magnitude... The Gulf States (read oil states) have very little beyond oil and it just might bite them in the a$$ in a big way.
I'm done ... sorry for the run on ...
Way to go AA...