It used to be very expensive to travel between US cities because a govt agency (forget the name, maybe the board of air travel?) set the who what how could fly planes from a to b, and at what price. Think mad men times, panAm, etc.
That agency was eliminated circa 1980 by some stroke of luck and perfect alingment of planets. Ticket prices plummeted and this opened flying to the poor.
That was also the last time a US regulatory agency was disbanded.
This wasn't because of regulatory overhead, it was because they had created regional monopolies for the airlines. It's exactly like insurance (or prescription drugs, if you're thinking internationally) is now, and that industry wages a life and death fight every time that"deregulation" comes up. It's corporate welfare created by federal corruption.
Is it possible that extremely high costs to enter the business, as well as extremely high operating costs mean that only the biggest airlines, with the most network benefits survive?
Sure. It's not an either/or. An airline company is hard to start regardless of what the gov't does. However, parsing out routes and giving airlines monopolies on them adds a significant number of bricks to the wall.
We might soon have another federal regulatory agency disbanded but considering which one it is I’m not sure if that will be a good thing for anyone but banks.
It used to be very expensive to travel between US cities because a govt agency (forget the name, maybe the board of air travel?) set the who what how could fly planes from a to b, and at what price. Think mad men times, panAm, etc.
That agency was eliminated circa 1980 by some stroke of luck and perfect alingment of planets. Ticket prices plummeted and this opened flying to the poor.
That was also the last time a US regulatory agency was disbanded.