Fly Game

James Surowiecki on why you encounter such memorable service on airlines:

Over the past six years, airlines have laid off more than a hundred thousand workers, around a sixth of their workforce, and six major carriers have shrunk their fleets—planes are expensive not only to acquire but to maintain—by twenty per cent. From an economic point of view, this was sensible. Making money in the airline business has always been tough—Warren Buffett has said that if capitalists had been present at the Wright brothers’ first flight they would have been well advised to shoot the plane down—but the years following 9/11, in which the industry lost more than thirty billion dollars and several airlines filed for bankruptcy, were especially brutal. So airlines moved aggressively to cut the fat out of their business, trying to insure that each of their planes flew as many flights, while carrying as many passengers, as possible. The strategy was so successful that, even as business has recovered, the airlines have chosen to stay slim. As a result, planes today are more crowded than before—last year, the airlines filled seventy-nine per cent of their seats, compared with sixty-five per cent in the mid-nineties—and forecasts suggest that the industry as a whole may clear four billion dollars in profits this year.