Cheap Airlines Flights Travel – Travel made cost effective.
Cheap flights do not mean cheap airplanes, however. There are only a few airplane manufacturers throughout the world, and they must build their planes to the needs of two tough taskmasters: the regulatory authorities who must be convinced of the soundness of the planes’ designs and their manufacture, and the customers, who have very specific needs from planes. These needs are expanding, which is improving the configuration and comfort of planes on a constant basis.
Cheap airlines therefore spend a lot on planes, and cheap travel need not be in a cattle car. On the contrary, we’re finding that the cheap airlines’ flights are better in many cases than those on the legacy airlines, not least because the legacy airlines have older equipment which is not used as efficiently as those by the ‘cheap’ airlines which compete with them.
So what’s happening with cheap flights these days? A lot. Not only are there a number of well-established less-expensive airlines, but there are more entering the market every day. The attrition rate can be high, however. In the US, for example, there have been over 75 airlines founded in the past 15 years, of which only 20 took to the air, and less than 10 are surviving today. These grim statistics point to a significant risk of bankruptcy if the startup airlines are unable to attract enough passengers quickly to pay their high capital costs and maintenance fees, not to mention the salaries of their many employees on the ground and in the air.
Cheap flights are therefore not cheap, particularly if the plane doesn’t fly full. The airlines must pay the same amount to fly, whether they have 20 passengers in a 137-passenger plan, or 137. Once they have covered their fixed costs—typically 80 passengers in a 137-passenger 737, the rest of the paying passengers’ fares go straight to the bottom line. That is why airlines pay so much attention to the revenue per seat mile flown—it’s a good indicator of the overall financial health of the routes that they fly. In the future, these ratings will become more important as planes get even larger.