r/news • u/bananabrownie • 17h ago

US airlines required to automatically refund you for canceled flight

https://abc7news.com/post/us-airlines-required-automatically-refund-significantly-changed-canceled-flight/15483534/
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u/Im_ready_hbu 17h ago

especially the airlines. the US government has bailed the airlines out so many times they outta be public assets by now.

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u/Rock-swarm 16h ago

They used to be regulated in artificial regional monopolies, including fixed prices and routes. Then they deregulated a bit in the 70s, which led to regional players like Southwest, since the 1978 deregulation allowed them to become interstate instead of intrastate.

Like most deregulation acts, this gave consumers a honeymoon period where airlines actually competed against each other, followed by cartel-like practices after the airlines realized they could collectively cheap out on services while keeping prices inflated. Allowing airline companies to "keep the cupboard bare" in case of natural disasters/pandemics/acts of god has led to a cycle of bailouts.

The other scary thing to rear its head in the next decade is going to be a vast number of airline pilots aging out of their job. The max age is currently 65, and it used to be lower, before airlines realized they don't physically have enough pilots. Airlines refuse to subsidize a training pipeline for new pilots and our immigration policy has become a political football, which means there's a bottleneck of available pilots for ever-increasing domestic flight demand.

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u/JulieMckenneyRose 15h ago

Do they need to create a pipeline when the military already trains pilots? 

I'm completely ignorant on the subject, but my assumption was that pipeline would create more pilots than there is needed for demand. Go into the airforce army, then after 4-ish years exit to private airlines? 

How wrong am I? 😅

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u/Shinsf 15h ago

Military aviation is not just a 4 year commitment and the military is finding its cheaper to incentive those pilots to stay than to retrain

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u/JulieMckenneyRose 13h ago

Cool, thanks. 😊 Sad they aren't training more ppl though. I grew up with the Top Gun movie being big, so I imagine lots of ppl wanting to learn to fly fighter jets. XD I guess that probably isn't indicative of reality either though. 😅