Originally Posted by
AeroEnvoy
I was doing some research about 9/11 and I stumbled into something interesting unintentionally. I noticed that the flight loads for all four hijacked airplanes were less than 100 pax. The loads ranged from 30-100 and some of these aircraft were wide body flying trans con flights. I guess my question here is how did the airlines stay in business back then (Pre-9/11) flying loads so light and now that they’re back to flying similar loads they’re in a bankruptcy panic? Any ideas or insight?
The short version is that those loads, and that business model, pre-9/11 were not sustainable. If you consider how many more players existed then, the industry was ripe for consolidation. 9/11 simply accelerated something that was inevitable. Fast forward 20 years, and that consolidation has occurred. Now you have amusing loads at carriers that have largely gone through an optimization process geared around relatively high load factors. That is also not sustainable.
”Hard Landing” ends in the mid-90’s, I think, but it does hit on some similar issues that the industry ran into post-deregulation. It’s an essential read for those who haven’t read it yet.