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by freshtacker999 1706 days ago
They're not. If you look at southwest, they had about a 10% profit margin in the year before COVID. Incredibly typical type of profit margin.
1 comments

This is a little bit misleading. You have to look at the entire history of the industry. A lot of consolidation has happened to eliminate competition. And pretty much every legacy airline has declared bankruptcy except for coincidentally, Southwest. Largely due to their founders strategy of avoiding overly leveraging the company. So much so that at one point during the pandemic when other airlines were overleveraged, their stock price did not crash and they were the most valuable airline in the country by a considerable amount.