FLYING THE FRIENDLY SKIES

This is actually the first blog I've ever written while airborne. At this moment, I'm on a Southwest 747 from Nashville to Chicago. It's about a 461 mile flight. Jet Fuel is running about $7 per gallon (from what my friend Glenn, who has his own plane, tells me). I cant imagine that this gas guzzling hunk of metal could guzzle enormous amounts of fuel while airborne, so let's just - for shits and giggles, say it takes 1000 gallons of fuel to get from Nashville to Chicago. I have really no idea what kid of fuel mileage they get, so 1000 gallons for a 461 mile trip seems safe. The total cost on that 1000 gallons is $7000.

Now lets say you pay each of the two pilots $1000 per day (plus benefits, so say another $100 per man). We're now at $8200 for fuel and pilots. Now, let's add in the ground crew. To be safe, lets average $30 per hour for each ground crew/baggage handlers who work a flight and lets say that each of them work one hour per flight. And for mathematical sake, lets say there are 10. We're now to $8500. A mechanic has to service the jet, refuel, empty the tanks, etc. Lets factor a couple of those in at $100 per hour. Up to $8700. Lest we forget the dear flight attendants and gate workers...average $500 per flight for six workers. Total jumped a little to $11700.

OH, I forgot the ticket counter folks...let's say $300 per day for those folks and average that two work per flight. We're now at $12,700. NOW, we need to assign a cost per aircraft per flight. I'm figuring that these big bitches probably cost about seven million dollars. They last for twenty years and are used every day multiple times, so....

Twenty years is 7300 days, and lets say each jet flies two flights per day. 7,000,000 divided by 7300 is just under $1000 per flight. Again, for simplification let's say $1000, I get $42 worth of padding for any parts that must be ordered/bought for service of the aircraft.

SHIT, I forgot the free drinks and peanuts. At the bulk the airlines buy drinks, they probably get them for $0.25 a piece, and say $0.05 for each bag of peanuts. SO, at 21 rows with six seats per row, we have 126 passengers who all get a beverage and two bags of salted or honey roasted (their choice) peanuts. Grand total for the nuts and drinks is $31.50 PLUS $12.60 EQUALS $47.10.

All in all, it brings our GRAND TOTAL to $13747.10. This includes all airport and airline personnel that are directly related to each flight, as well as fuel costs, maintenance and aircraft.

I haven't been on a flight in over a year that hasn't been either completely full or oversold. Let's just say the average one way ticket is $150 not counting taxes and the $3 airport fee), at 126 passengers that gross is $18900. That's $5000 per flight of PROFIT. And who are we kidding, most of these planes are flying three or four trips per day, so when you factor that it's $20000 per plane per day. And if you have 100 aircraft in your fleet, we're talking $2,000,000 profit per day. TWO MILLION DOLLARS PER DAY. I'm sure I'm leaving out some major expense, like the damn Spirit magazine that occupies my time so well, or maybe the maintenance costs of the award winning website. But if you can't thrive on making TWO MILLION DOLLARS PER DAY in flight profit something is sadly wrong.

All that to say that American just started charging to check even one bag and next month US Airways will begin to charge $3 for their in flight beverages (non-alcoholic).

I wrote in this blog last month that Canada Customs was the biggest racket I'd ever seen, but I stand corrected.