Per-flight costs
I got bored today and sat down to get an idea of how much it actually costs an airline to operate a flight from A to B. I'd like to share what I did, and get some more input from any other equally bored people.
I used a 737-600 on a 1,000 nm trip (approx 2 hours), and some estimated data on its fuel burn with 100 people and their bags on it. Using that, I got a number of about 12 lbs per mile fuel burn. That's about 2 gallons per mile, assume $4/gallon (I don't know what an airline might actually pay for Jet A) and you get a fuel bill of $8000 for the flight.
Pay the captain $140 per flight hour, the FO $80, and each of 3 flight attendants $30, and you get a $620 payroll. Lets just double that to account for hotel, per-diem, insurance, and all the other stuff they have to pay for crews. That's $1240.
Total so far is $9,240.
I have no idea how many man-hours of gate agent and ground crew labor it might take to operate a flight like this. 10 man-hours at $10/hour maybe? Let's just double it again to get a $200 cost for that.
$9440
Assuming the airline purchased the airplane and paid $50M cash for it, and expects to keep it for 20 years, it would break down to $6,850 per day. Lets assume that this airplane averages 4 flights per day. The cost of owning the airplane for this particular flight then is $1712. Let's just round that up to $1750.
Now we're at $11190.
I'm clueless as to the cost of maintenance/parts for something like this. I'm just going to say $1000 for this flight.
$12190.
Now, I know that insurance, taxes, and various other fees go into this as well. But I don't know how much. I'm going to stop here and see what else everyone can come up with, and what you can correct for me. Not to mention salaries of all the pencil-pushers, execs, and the like.
Even up to this point though, I've only got the cost per-passenger up to about $122.