[falcolas]

> But is it really true?

Well, aircraft are really, really expensive. On the order of hundreds of millions of dollars apiece just to buy. Then there's the yearly maintenance which involves tearing them apart and putting them back together. And the jet fuel, airport landing fees, highly trained personnel, regulations...

This means their operation costs eat up somewhere around 80-90% of the revenue for any single full flight. I can't imagine personally trying to manage such a system and eeking profit out of it.

One of the big reasons airlines even survive while serving so many otherwise unprofitable locations is because of the federal grants, and the regulations that ensure they do serve more than just the biggest metropolitan areas.

In other words, if unregulated and not provided with grants, airlines would only ever serve the major cities (with higher ticket prices as they do so), because it would never be profitable to serve anywhere else. They would also completely fold after the first downturn in air travel (9/11 would have effectively killed all the airlines).