revenue passenger mile

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Competition Demystified by Bruce C. Greenwald

additive manufacturing, airline deregulation, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, barriers to entry, book value, business cycle, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, deindustrialization, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fault tolerance, intangible asset, John Nash: game theory, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, PalmPilot, Pepsi Challenge, pets.com, price discrimination, price stability, revenue passenger mile, search costs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, vertical integration, warehouse automation, yield management, zero-sum game

Sometimes the challenger was simply too egregious, and incumbents retaliated not simply to keep their passengers but to drive the upstart out of business. The more strategic response, developed over some years after 1978, involved the use of a complex and opportunistic fare system to manage “yield” and “load.” The airlines defined “yield” as revenue divided by revenue passenger miles (the number of passenger seat miles actually sold), “load” (or “load factor”) as revenue passenger miles divided by available seat miles. Using their computerized reservations systems, the airlines could offer identical seats at wildly different prices, depending on travel restrictions, time of purchase, and the remaining availability of seats.

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Pilots as managers could fly planes, if the need arose and a scheduled pilot called in sick. Before it began flying, the company calculated that it could break even if it filled around 50 percent of its seats. Its cost structure was planned to come in at 20 percent lower than United’s per revenue passenger mile. Though this savings was substantial, South-west’s cost were some 18 percent lower still. But lower costs did not present the same kind of frontal challenge to the established airlines that well-advertised lower fares might. Kiwi did not want to arouse the slumbering giants. WHAT THE INCUMBENTS SAW At first, Kiwi made it easy for United, American, Delta, and Continental to ignore it.

Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am by Robert Gandt

airline deregulation, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, flag carrier, hiring and firing, invisible hand, Maui Hawaii, RAND corporation, revenue passenger mile, Tenerife airport disaster, yield management, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

Best of all, at least for wary passengers, they looked and felt like conventional propeller-driven airliners powered by conventional engines. Claptrap, snorted Juan Trippe. Smith was leading the chorus of the Primitives. To Trippe, the jet was imminently logical and inevitable. Never mind the whining about development expense and cost per copy and revenue-passenger-mile cost and noise and range and economy. Those problems would be solved. They always were. Speed, for its own sake, was not the most important factor. Flying the Atlantic in half the time of its propeller-driven predecessors meant the jet could transport many more passengers in the same time frame.

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Here it was, setting industry standards for leaving on time, delighting its passengers, even sweeping the halls and cleaning up the johns—and it was still losing $2 million a day. Why couldn’t Pan Am make money? Well, actually. . . nobody could say. No one had ever delivered a simple, concise answer, any more than anyone had explained why Pan Am made money at one time. When Plaskett trotted out his cue cards and recited statistics about RPMs (revenue passenger miles) and load factors (percentage of seats filled) and yield (how much you were getting—or in Pan Am’s case, weren’t getting—from your product), it sounded like a lot of smoke from a number cruncher, which it was. The audience listened politely, scratched their heads, and wondered: What the hell does it mean?

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

The growth rate between 1929 and 1950 was 6.2 percent, followed by an acceleration to 8.0 percent between 1950 and 1980. But then diminishing returns set in; the annual growth rate from 1980 to 2012 was a mere 1.1 percent. In fact, vehicle miles per person in 2012 were 6.4 percent lower than in 2004. Airline revenue passenger miles (RPMs), also shown in figure 11–1, exhibited the same phenomenon of slowing growth. It is natural for any industry to experience rapid growth after a fundamental invention and then to have demand for its product level off as the product reaches maturity. Growth in RPMs per person reached 32 percent per year between 1940 and 1960, 16.5 percent between 1960 and 1980, and 7.8 percent between 1980 and 2000.

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Traffic tripled in the 1950s, tripled again in the 1960s, doubled in the 1970s, and almost doubled in the 1980s before slowing to a crawl. RPMs per person stopped growing after 2000, with the growth rate between 2000 and 2013 at the turtlelike pace of 0.6 percent per year. Figure 11–1. Vehicle-Miles per Person, Railroad Passenger-Miles per Person, and Airline Revenue Passenger-Miles per Person, 1900–2012 Source: Federal Highway Administration Table VM-201, HSUS series Df413-415, Df903, Df950, and Aa7, Traffic Safety Facts NHTSA Chapter 1 Table 2, SAUS 2014 Table 1120, A4A Annual Results U.S. Airlines Table, HSUS Series Df1126-1138, Airline RPM after 1948 from A4A Annual Results U.S.

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–Canadian border, the closely parallel Great Northern and Northern Pacific, the closely parallel Union/Central Pacific, Kansas Pacific, and Santa Fe, and near the Mexican border the Southern Pacific from New Orleans to Los Angeles. 13. The best recent source is White (2011). Classic earlier references include Chandler (1977). 14. Stilgoe (2007, p. 115). 15. System revenue passenger miles from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. 16. As shown in table 5–1, in 1870 elapsed railroad times between major cities were between twenty and twenty-five miles per hour. 17. Cronon (1991, p. 77) displays iso-travel time graphs for 1830 and 1857. 18. This and other details in the previous two paragraphs come from Cronon (1991, pp. 76–78). 19.

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

"World Economic Forum" Davos, animal electricity, clean water, colonial rule, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, fake news, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, global pandemic, Hans Rosling, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), jimmy wales, linked data, lone genius, microcredit, purchasing power parity, revenue passenger mile, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Walter Mischel

“Theories of Fertility Decline and the Evidence from Development Indicators.” Population and Development Review 33, no. 1 (March 2007): 101–27. BTS[1]. (US Bureau of Transportation Statistics). US Air Carrier Safety Data. Total fatalities. National Transportation Statistics. Table 2-9. Accessed November 24, 2017. gapm.io/xbtsafat. BTS[2]. Revenue Passenger-miles (the number of passengers and the distance flown in thousands (000)). T-100 Segment data. Accessed November 4, 2017. gapm.io/xbtspass. Caldwell, J. C. “Three Fertility Compromises and Two Transitions.” Population Research and Policy Review 27, no. 4 (2008): 427–46. gapm.io/xcaltfrt. Carson, Rachel.

Hard Landing by Thomas Petzinger, Thomas Petzinger Jr.

airline deregulation, Boeing 747, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, cross-subsidies, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, feminist movement, index card, junk bonds, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Michael Milken, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, price stability, profit motive, Ralph Nader, revenue passenger mile, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Predators' Ball, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, yield management, zero-sum game

Dubinsky immediately went into action. If the bitter strike had proved anything, in Dubinsky’s view, it was that airline pilots were nothing more than hired help. “Airline pilots are simply a form of high-paid production workers,” he would later declare in a speech at Harvard. “We produce revenue-passenger miles instead of widgets, TV sets, or shoes.” Pilots, though long accustomed to thinking of themselves as “professionals,” were not in fact professionals at all by the standard definition, Dubinsky realized: a professional could go into business for himself, could hang out his own shingle. Airline pilots could do none of that.

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“run a lawn mower”: Burr 9/16/93 interview. 11. had been wrapped up: Burr 9/17/93 interview. 12. plan to reform: Burr’s scheme was detailed in the 9/16/93 interview. A copy of the plan was made available to the author by another party. 13. “Don, come here”: Burr 9/16/93 interview. 14. “Carney rolls the spitballs”: Coats 6/9/94 interview. 15. The next four: Based on 1978 rankings according to revenue passenger miles. 16. fact that appalled Lorenzo: “Texas International’s Lorenzo Believes He Has a National Grasp,” by Nicholas C. Chriss, Los Angeles Times, Oct. 29, 1978. 17. never been a hostile: Davies, Continental Airlines, page 85. 18. Slowly and imperceptibly: Russell, Miami Herald, Aug. 6, 1978. 19. hands were trembling: J.