It's the Democrats. More specifically, Al Gore, for inventing the internet.

One of the major problems with the airlines is that they can't and won't act as a group that controls their industry. As an example: when the price of oil goes up, even a few cents, per barrel, the oil companies immediately raise their at-the-pump prices. Immediately. All of them. Every last one. When the price of a barrel goes down, the oil companies, again, all of them, take their sweet time in lowering their at-the-pump and home heating oil prices.

The airlines can't get together on an issue that's killing them. I believe the primary reason is that each in turn is afraid that if they raise their prices, even a buck or two, they will not show up as the price leader, when someone does a low-cost fare search on the internet. This mentality, while tragic, is so crazy, as to be laughable. In effect, what it does is make it unprofitable for airlines to carry people. After 9-11, they would have been better off by stopping their flight schedules, and sending all their employees home, and just sending them their paychecks, each month. It would have taken them much longer to deplete their financial resources.

As well, there is no consistency of pricing, even within the same airline. You can be on a plane, where almost everyone has paid a different price for their ticket. I sort of understand the logic behind this phenomenon, but am still a little confused. It would seem to me that if an airline has a 120 seat jet, leaving (as an example) Chicago for Los Angeles, next Wednesday, and they have 90 seats sold, that as the clock ticks down to departure time, the value of those seats would become less and less. The reason being, if the seat can't be sold, they still have to be transported. Wouldn't it make more sense to sell that ticket for a reduced price, than to leave it empty? Instead, it's the reverse. If you buy a ticket the day before, it's at a higher price than if you had bought it two weeks ago. Makes no sense. The plane is still going to go.

One of the reasons the cargo carriers have done so well in this Post 9-11 environment is that they assign a fuel surcharge, thereby defraying the added cost of operating that jet. The interesting thing is that their customers understand this and continue to use the service. If the commercial carriers had done that from the get-go, I believe they wouldn't have had to take their drastic actions against their employee groups. Plain and simple.... their management doesn't have the hutspah.