The Washington Post. With deregulation, profit-making takes a different form.
Airlines trim expenses wherever they can.
They cut maintenance crews, hot meals, flight attendants, and use more older, recycled planes. On start-up airlines, pilots tend to be less experienced and lower paid than on the established carriers, and there is little or no fulltime maintenance staff. And comnpetitiveness is a moving target, for somebody is always cutting deeper than you. Believe it or not, adjusting for fuel costs, ticket prices actually declined faster in the 15 years before deregulation than in the fifteen years after. It's one thing to entrust everything to competition in, say, auto-rentals.