The industry did not come back stronger than before. The industry barely came back to small profits after gutting itself for many years. This current fuel problem has the industry much more screwed than they were after 9/11. There just isn't anything left to steal from the employees and very little left to wrangle from the suppliers. Unless fuel prices go down a lot, at least one of the legacies will die and the survivors will be just hanging on, most likely in bankruptcy protection. I don't know if the analysts are correct about needing a 20 percent cut in capacity before the seat prices can be adjusted enough to pay the bills, but if they are the airlines are not cutting fast enough to accomplish that. They are making cuts to outlast one or more of the competition- last long enough for the seat capacity to be gone through attrition.

The airlines have been a very cyclical industry, but their history is actually very short overall. The oil age may be coming to an end in the near future and that will have a huge impact on aviation- bigger than any of the cycles it has already gone through. I love flying and bet my career on a pilots life, but things are definitely getting very spooky. There will continue to be airplanes, but nobody knows what the jobs will be or how many of them there will be as things change. There is no such thing as a hybrid or plug-in jet. The high prices we are paying now will surely advance research for other fuel options at a much quicker rate than before, but it isn't going to happen fast enough for the airlines to not have a massive overhaul if oil doesn't come down quickly. Even in the cycles we have seen many mighty legacies that went away. This job has always been a gamble, but the odds are just getting worse and worse for the players now. The highest pay that was more worth the risk to try to attain is now gone. Now you are risking your time and money on a career with a lower ceiling and most likely less positions in the near term even with the lower ceiling. Maybe pay will go up again if some new technology brings the price to propel the aircraft way down so that the profits are high enough for the pilots to demand a higher chunk, but right now the opposite is happening and I doubt we'll be seeing a new, significantly cheaper fuel in the next 5 to 10 years. I sure hope I'm wrong about most of this. Good luck in this crazy profession.