[mym1990]

You're never going to see the price of airline tickets fall by 50% due to eliminating pilots, or likely any other reason. The companies will just use the increased margins to pad their own pockets while probably raising prices under the guise of innovation or other additional features.

With the exception of a few markets that have price volatility, deflation is a really rare thing. What people get instead are products that are packed with either more performance or more features(whether useful or not) and that is justification for the slight price increases that we see from year to year.

[sebzim4500]

If airlines are so good at padding their own pockets why do they keep going bust? The whole industry is running paper thin margins.

[stevepeg]

I think the GP comment you're replying to nailed the reason why:

> I take a contrarian opinion on this, the price of a flight in the US outside of major hubs is egregious. Especially during peak times or holidays.

Highly-engineered tubes that fly 10km above the ground at very high speeds, have absolutely amazing reliability and long-term safety, and can navigate all over the world are, unsurprisingly, very expensive. But people still want to hop in one and pay less than a train ticket.

[mym1990]

United Airlines is posting anywhere from 15-30 billion in gross profit for each of the last 4 years, AA and Delta are on somewhat similar trajectories adjusted for size. The airlines going bust operate in the only space that they can be competitive in, which is the one with razor thin margins. You can guarantee that prices will never come down if there are only 3 major players in a $140 billion size domestic market.