Ok... there's something in these numbers that doesn't quite pan out for me. I'm hoping that some of the more financially knowledgeable on here can shed some light on this. Every media outlet in the country is talking doom and gloom about how oil prices are killing this industry. I ran some rough numbers in my head yesterday while sitting half way through a trans-con. Looking at the fuel flow I'm seeing a burn rate of about 5000 pph, give or take. That's about 750 gal/hour. The last report I read was that UAL was paying about $3.22/gal for jet fuel at the moment. Ok... now if jet fuel were to go up $1/gal, then the price to operate that aircraft just went up $750/hr right? Now assuming an A319/320 has anywhere from 120 to 154 seats... and assuming an average load factor of just over 80% let's conservatively assume at least 100 pax for the sake of nice round numbers.

So... I'm seeing an additional $7.50 per passenger, per hour in fuel expense, for every dollar increase in jet fuel. This is assuming an Airbus, as I don't know the specifics on the other fleets, but I assume the economies of scale would improve on this as the A/C gets bigger.

My point is that $7.50 per person, per hour is not much! That's less than 50 bucks a ticket on a trans-con! And that's considering 31% increase in the cost of jet fuel. Now granted... as fares go up, some people will elect not to fly. But I can't see that an additional $50 bucks on a cross-country flight is going to scare away that many folks. I think flying is still VERY cheap considering the cost of living has pretty much been marching forward at 3%/year... and people are still paying the same or less to fly that they were 15 or 20 years ago.

Ok beancounters... am I missing something????