A few years ago I worked for ITA Software, a very successful privately-held company whose customers were airlines. Along with about a hundred other people there, I was on a big project to build a new airline reservation system from the ground up, something that pretty much hadn’t been done since the 1970s. It may surprise you to know that most airlines still rely on reservation software originally written before 1976, though these systems have seen their code base updated and wrapped with more modern trappings since then.
Still, no one had really re-engineered a system with all the things we’ve learned about databases in the last 40 years. So ITA was trying. But then Air Canada, the customer, went bankrupt, prompting someone to ask the CEO, at a company meeting, what he thought the prospects were.
He said, “Well, Air Canada has entered bankruptcy. Something that we in the industry refer to as a natural part of the life cycle of an airline.” It got a big laugh, though perhaps this was gallows humor, since lots of the audience got their walking papers within a couple of weeks.
One question is what exactly happened in the 1970s that halted innovation in airline data processing? Could the data processing problem just be too complicated? Though this is a serious line of inquiry for anyone who has ever tried to make sense of airline schedule data, it seems pretty unlikely compared to some more recent data achievements, like cell phones or Google. Another question is what does it mean when airlines seem so financially fragile.
Hmmm. Think think think. What happened in the 1970s?
Oh, yes: transportation deregulation happened. Planted as a wholly bipartisan enterprise in think tanks and in academia in the 1960s, the deregulation movement flowered during in Jimmy Carter’s administration, and reached astonishing heights under Ronald Reagan’s. Reformers were going to free the engines of capitalism from the yoke of unnecessary regulation. The result: win-win situations everywhere, with lower prices for consumers and better-paid CEOs. What could be better?
Lots of things, it turns out. Flights are slower and more expensive than they once were, and airlines are more fragile, preventing them from innovating in any ways besides figuring out how to pay their employees less and charge their customers more.
They don’t even make more money. You can see that with numbers from Airlines For America, the big trade group for big US airlines. Quoting from the estimable Doug Henwood:
“Between 1948 and 1978, the industry made $5.5 billion in total (or $28.7 billion in 2011 dollars). Between 1979 and 2011, it lost $37.7 billion (or $41.6 billion in 2011 dollars). Of course, I’m not here to defend corporate profits, but it’s hard to see how an industry can survive under capitalism in a chronic state of loss.”
So what got better? Price? Since 1982, the consumer price index overall has risen by a factor of 2.8% per year, while the airfare component has gone up 3.9% per year, just slightly slower than the gas index. Part of the increase in the index is is that the quality has declined — there are many fewer non-stop flights than there once were and service, well…
Service? Planes are more crowded, make more stops, exact more fees, and have seen a virtual end to every single perk passengers once enjoyed as a matter of course. It’s hard even to see the need to document the decline in service, but it’s there. If you ignore the drop in quality, prices have risen somewhat slower than inflation since 1995, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. This seems fair, but less so when you realize that it’s not just that you’re getting poor service, you’re being charged for the quality you’re no longer getting with your ticket, and in many cases unavoidably.
Wages? Like everywhere, the CEOs have it pretty good. American Airline’s Gerard Arpey earned $5.9 million in 2010 and that airline was bankrupt before 2011 was over. AA has been looking for wage and benefit concessions from their unions ever since. Between deregulation and 1995, wages in all industries rose 83%, according to the BLS. Airplane mechanics saw an increase of 68%, pilots of 56%, and sales agents 28%. Airline employees have not kept pace with the rest of the private sector.
Could labor unions be part of the problem? Possibly, but consider that Southwest is about the only consistently profitable airline around, and it is also about the most heavily unionized airline in the US.
Southwest could stand as a counter-example to this whole tale of woe, but here’s the question of perspective. When I want to book a flight from here to Utah, it is a question of no interest to me whether some airline somewhere can make money on the routes it serves. Instead the only questions on my mind are about the airlines who do go to Salt Lake City. As it turns out, Southwest has made a business decision not to serve that city, and that’s fine for them, but what about me and all the other people who want to go there?
In short, deregulation has been a 30-year disaster, playing out in motion so slow it’s easy to ignore. But here we are, 30 years later, paying higher prices for a worse product to an industry that pays worse wages. Yay free market.
Obviously it’s true that regulators are prone to capture by the industry they regulate. But it’s equally obvious to those who look that deregulation is no picnic either. (It’s not as if financial deregulation has been less of a horror show than it has been for airlines.) All this was obvious to those who looked decades ago.
Doug Henwood, who I quoted above, points out in an earlier article (23 years earlier!) that regulation was originally the idea of big business, to prevent ruinous competition. Deregulators, then, could claim to be acting against business, on behalf of consumers. But consumers are also workers, as so many of us seem to forget. When deregulation created the conditions for pay cuts, service cuts, and mergers — and when it deep sixes the possibility of investing in innovation — was it really consumers who benefited? Was it our nation?
Your premise that airline deregulation of the 70′s turned air travel into a free market paradise is completely false. That deregulation affected only one aspect of air travel but left intact the other 2 critical components — airports and air traffic control, which are government controlled and owned. We don’t have any more of a free market in air travel than we have a free market in banking.
“It’s not as if financial deregulation has been less of a horror show than it has been for airlines.”
Right, I forgot. Gov’t only reduced regulations on the financial sector. I guess we’ll completely ignore the CRA, HUD mandates and Fed involvement in the banking/housing crisis. Oh, and Sarbanes-Oxley — we’ll ignore that too.
Great article! Some thoughts: There is certainly a correlation between deregulation and declining airline efficiency. But what’s not clear is how the causation works. Removing which regulations led to this mess?
There have been several other major changes in the air travel market in the past few decades that I think could be responsible for the decline of the airlines. First, the manufacture of large aircraft has gradually become a Boeing monopoly, with Embraer supplying some smaller jets. Fuel prices have also risen. And then there’s the rise of the regional carriers.
It’s not clear to me that these factors aren’t the main driving force behind the problems in the airline industry.
“First, the manufacture of large aircraft has gradually become a Boeing monopoly”
I think Airbus would have something to say to that
I am an American. I meant in America. I know there are Airbus planes in America, but I can’t remember the last time I ever flew on one outside of Europe.
We’ll all be seeing more of Airbus:
Boeing Says Airbus Move Is No Cause for Concern
I was under the impression that deregulation provided many more opportunities for people to fly and allowed for deep discounting that many people take advantage of when they fly for family vacations and the like. Many more flights, more routes (even if not nonstop).
While average prices may be higher, there are deep discounts for those who look for them that never existed back then.
Remember what it was like flying in the mid-70′s? I don’t, because my middle to upper-middle class family never flew anywhere. My kids, all young adults now, all flew many times before they turned 20, like many middle class kids these days.
After what we’ve been through the last five years, I still can’t get over how many people out there still insist what happened was the result of not deregulating enough. I don’t think so, to say the least but this thread has gone off on an interesting tangent. The Airbus deal with the state of Alabama, in the minds of some, is the latest example of how counterproductive competition between the states, to get companies to locate their operations within their borders, is
www.remappingdebate.org/article/“-everybody-does-it”-—-cities-and-states-addicted-soliciting-corporate-favors?page=0,2
but that is not directly related to deregulation, I suppose. It is part of the same “small government”, tax slashing, deregulation mindset, however. Who really benefits?
“assembling the A320 in Alabama, where wages were likely to be lower than at Airbus’s factories in Germany and France, would enable the European company to achieve significant unit-cost savings or to undercut Boeing significantly on the pricing of its planes.”
In the NYT article Connor also says,
““Final assembly represents a pretty small part of the value” of an aircraft, he said.”
But, the Times article goes onto say:
“Analysts estimate that final assembly represents only about 5 percent of the value of an aircraft, but can represent about 15 percent of a manufacturer’s in-house costs.
Add that to the fact Airbus is going to have 158 million of it’s 600 million dollar investment relieved with state and local support. Seems like Airbus makes out like a bandit on this one.
Wasn’t Boeing involved in a dispute over a non union plant down South, too? I don’t see many boats lifted by these kind of deals, maybe a few airplanes for the jet set but . . . at least Boeing still has some competition, it would seem.
Sorry, the link to Remapping Debate above takes you to page three of the article on the Airbus plant in Alabama. Here is the link to the first page which starts off the discussion with the details involving the Airbus plant:
www.remappingdebate.org/article/“-everybody-does-it”-—-cities-and-states-addicted-soliciting-corporate-favors?page=0,0