Passenger Aviation in the United States: 40 Years of Failure

Some things that work as technology don’t work as a business model. The Concorde was like that. An engineering marvel that couldn’t make money. But as this great GAO chart shows (via Richard Layman) basically the entire passenger aviation industry in the United States is like that. For decades people have been flying around the country in airplanes and yet in the aggregate the whole thing is a stunning business failure. Southwest has made money and basically nobody else has.