Airlines are flapping around like ducks in a tornado, trying to figure out how to fill seats as passenger demand continues to plunge. Fare sales are busting out all over.
Just one cheery note for the industry. Fuel prices continue to drop. This just in from the Bureau of transportation Statistics showing the latest figures on average fuel prices per gallon on domestic scheduled flights:
January 2009 -- $1.75
December 2008 -- $2.04
January 2008 -- $2.61
Other interesting numbers: Despite the price drop, fuel consumption in January was 901.9 million gallons, compared with 1.1 billion gallons in January 2008. I'm not aware of any great fuel-burn efficiencies to account for that. It strictly reflects the fall-off in flying.
By the way, in July 2008, the peak, fuel prices were $3.82 a gallon.
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By JOE SHARKEY
Bio
- Joesharkey.com
- Joe Sharkey's work appears in major national and international publications. For 19 years until 2015 he was a weekly columnist for the New York Times. He is now a weekly travel and entertainment columnist with the global website Travel.Buzz, as well as an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of Arizona, He has written five books, four non-fiction and a novel, one of which is in development as a movie. Previously, he was an assistant national editor at the Wall Street Journal and a reporter and columnist with the Philadelphia Inquirer. On Sept. 29, 2006, he was one of seven people on a business jet who survived a mid-air collision with a 737 over the Amazon. All 154 on the 737 died. His report on the crash appeared on the front page of the New York Times and later in the Sunday Times of London magazine. He and his wife Nancy (who is a professor of journalism at the University of Arizona) live in Tucson with horses and parrots. He is working on a new novel about an international travel writer who hates to travel. "JoeSharkey.com" is Copyright (c) 2006-2015 by Joe Sharkey.
1 comment:
So much for those silly supply and demand curves economists are always drawing.
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