Looking for a new future: beyond the Rust Belt

The past few years have witnessed a remarkable turnaround in US legacy airline profitability. It is still not enough to move the investment world to forsake IT stocks and, granted one of the majors has slipped into bankruptcy, but there has been an unusual amount of black ink recently. A lot of this is usually ascribed to consolidation in the domestic industry - with the predictable effect of reducing competition and allowing yields to increase. That certainly seems to have helped.

But the really dramatic bottom line effects have come from the imposition of baggage fees and increases in cancellation fees.

This is the second part of a report that has been extracted from the August-September 2012 issue of CAPA's Airline Leader hard copy journal. Click here to view a cutting edge html5 version.