Robert Cohen wrote:
In the mid-late 1990s, I saw in the local newspaper that some senior
Delta captains were being paid approximately up to $500,000 a year, and
that the Delta Board of Directors pays the new CEO Leo Mullin millions
(how many?) and the other top management gets pretty nice pay too,

But those are NOT the reasons for the problems in the airline industry!

CEOs of thriving (and some non-thriving) companies make tens of
Millions a year, plus bonus, plus stock options, etc., etc.
Stock Fund Managers make millions of bucks a year for doing
something that a monkey throwing darts can do BETTER -- the
mutual funds as a group ALWAYS do worse than the DOW and the
SP500, as a result of frivolous trading for window dressing
every Quarter, not to mention lining their own pockets.
Then you have professional Athletes demanding millions of
bucks a year just to play ball.

It's called the FREE MARKET.

Everyone is entitled to earn what the market will bear.
That's why Delta was NOT losing big bucks every quarter before
9/11, and that's NOT the reason other thrift airlines went out
of business.

It's mostly Management. That's why Walmart is thriving and
K-mart is going out of business.


I perceived that with the de-regulated discounting of a ValueJet,
Southwest, etal, that our Atlanta-based largest employer was actually
skating on thin market insecure ice. And this was when Delta was
supposedly considered solvent/profit-making, which I never believed
since I'm old enough to recall Eastern and the others.

Whether you believed it or not, Delta and other airlines WERE
making profits. Eastern went belly up for reasons of incompetent
Management!


Plus I did not
enjoy/get them thar free/reduced passes & fares, and thus frankly
felt... why should I patronize them.

Some of those are no different from their spending millions of
bucks on ADVERTISING! Just read the nesgroups and see while ADs
are not allowed, you have plenty of legit customer praises and
legit complaints (not those by Paul Tauger and other whiners)
about airlines. They are much more beneficial to the airlines
than paying big bucks on TV to "Fly the Friendly Skiies ..."
-- I am sure you remember those. It's the same damned sky ALL
airlines fly. :-) That's why you DON'T see those silly ads any
more.

Obviously, price trumps, and the
Walmart airlines thus have prevailed. We've actually "driven to
Birmingham & Greenville" airports so as not to have to pay that couple
of hundred bucks more.

From Atlanta?

I lived in your area for decades. I used to live 30 miles from
GSP (Greenville/Spartanburg SC), and about 120 miles from the
ATL airport. I don't recall many occasions in which I flew out
of GSP instead of ATL.

In fact, I live in a city about the size of Greenville that has
its own airport, which services AA, Delta, and several other
airlines, but almost without exception, I fly out of Atlanta
(and NOT flying Delta), but CO, which does not have a hub there.


As it was predicted upon de-regulation circa
late 1970s, things chaotically became...what they are,

That's because the "deregulation" is only "partial", and the
airlines are STILL a very much REGULATED industry, by Uncle Sam.
And THAT's part of the trouble. The airline companies are NOT
free to do what a truly FREE MARKET would allow them to do,
except some minor, fly-by-night airlines whose cost-saving
gimmicks soon ran out of the kind of paupers who would support
them.


though I won't
eliminate 9/11 & fuel prices as precipitating the decline of the
greatly respected brand name. C'est la vie, c'est la morte.

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/09/22/D8CPAVCG1.html

The 9/11 has proven the success of Bin Laden against the USA.
The twin towers were only the symbols they destroyed. They
devastated the airline industry, the cruise industry, and
many other industries from the fall out.

Worst of all, Bin Laden tricked Bush into trying to put the
blame on Saddam because to this day the Bush administration
has not had ANY success dealing with the ongoing terrorism
claimed by those Terrorists. Instead of Bush wasted BILLIONS
and BILLIONS of American dollars (and worse American LIVES)
on HIS unilateral declaration of war on Iraq, and more
Americans died there AFTER Bush declared that the war was
"won" than before. Bush has had his feet so deep in doo doo
there that it'll be YEARS before the Americans, and the USA,
will recover from the HUNDREDS of Billions of dollars Bush
pumped into the National Debt account.

Don't blame it on those things you blamed on Delta.

Blame it on the result of 9/11, and Bush;s MANAGEMENT of the
USA. The economy of the USA suffered as a result, which
brought ALL the airlines down to their collective knees.
They were just some of the victims of what the fishing
industry's unintended kills when the shrimp catch by dragnet
kills hundred pounds of unedible marine life for every 10
pounds of shrmpt caught.

The DOW and the NASDAQ composites are still only at a small
fraction of what they were before 9/11.

If we are going to blame the airline industry problems on
anyone, let's at least put things in their proper perspectives.

-- Bob.