Two things come to mind; First, the airlines HAVE passed the fuel costs on to the public by adding surcharges -$150 per ticket that I’ve seen- as well as the added service charges. With every seat filled, i don’t see how this hasn’t offset the added fuel prices.

Secondly, and Jimmy the D. may want to consider this, when will people finally realize that not all problems, esp. in the public arena, can be answered by the free market, private corporation model. The inflated price of European auto fuel is from TAXES that their Gov’s have used to insure good public trans, infrastructure, as well as promote conservation. It may amount to more Socialized Gov functions, but won’t that add to greater security for their people in these stressful times? Our privatized system took advantage of cheap oil simply by producing large inefficient gas guzzlers w/o any premonition to the future simply b/c they’re not paid to do so. That’s what we pay a Govmnt to do. Instead, all they seem interested in is that same bottom line. Now we all pay!

The thing is, we’ve seen this exact same thing happen before. While passenger rail service started contracting in the late ’50s, a large number of trains were still operated because the gains from the mail service contracts offset the passenger losses. This ended in 1967 when the Post Office cancelled all rail service and moved towards commerical airliners. Within four years, passenger rail service was nationalized.

Passenger aviation is unprofitable when all costs are fully taken into account. Even in the mid ’90s, when oil was cheap, security was small, and air company profits were high, the industry’s collected profit was less than that of the government-borne infrastructure costs. Certainly, some of those costs are paid by the users in the form of excise taxes and landing fees, but a lot of the direct costs and just about all of the indirect costs come out of the general fund.

I believe that solid, reliable, inexpensive transportation is a fundamental need. A robust economy requires an efficient system of moving goods and people around. Because of this, the government has to take some role in shaping the aviation industry. Pure nationalization is not the way to go. Amtrak is a much needed service and since it’s what we have I support it dearly, but it should have been handled differently. That’s a topic for another day, however.

First and formost, the country needs a rational transportation vision, which we’ve never had. In America, we see the various modes of transportation as competitors rather than different means to accmplish the same ends. As part of this, we’ll have to figure out what flights actually need to exist. Why are there flights between O’Hare and Milwaukee, for exmaple? Or DFW and Waco? That should be handled on the ground. This would require vast sums of money in order to bring existing rail routes up to par, to build new ones, and to actually integrate them into our airports, but it needs to be done. You can’t built a nuclear, solar, hydroelectric, or wind powered airplane, but we already have trains that are powered by those sources of energy. We just call them electric trains.

Then, once we figure out what flights we actually need (at a guess, everything in excess of 500 miles), the government will have to step in and provide a pre-determined per-passenger mile subsidy for a given route. United and American would stil compete for the O’Hare to Los Angeles route, but they’d be competing on service and amenities in order to attract the greatest number of passengers (and thus a bigger slice of the subsidy pie). Airlines would still be free to run flights on the unsubsidized routes, but they would have to bear the fully allocated costs of doing so.

That’s how i”d do it, anyway. There’s problems, yes, but I think that ultimately a true public-private partnership is the only way out of here.