This Morning's Ethanol Message 2

From: Ray Marshall [raymarsh@mninter.net]
Sent: Wednesday, May 03, 2006 11:31 AM
To: John L. Sweeney
Subject: RE: This morning's Ethanol message

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That “hub and spoke system” might be another place to start. I would bet that taking off and landing takes ¾ of the fuel that a plane consumes. But management is so afraid of losing a fare to another airline that they are determined to stop everywhere (God forbid that they drop somebody off in Chicago so that they can then catch a plane from a different airline to reach Sioux Falls). That’s got to be a big percentage of their fuel (and maintenance) costs.

De-regulation contributed a lot to this. Management got greedy; 20 small airlines got gobbled up; some got rich for a while; but no longer. Maybe it is time to “re-regulate” the airlines? Give them some financial security and give them monopolies at smaller airports.

I think a lot of those airlines around the world are given national monopolies by their governments. That is starting to disappear in the EU and some of the smaller lines are starting to be folded into the majors.

-----Original Message-----

From: John L. Sweeney [mailto:sweelab@enter.net]
Sent: Wednesday, May 03, 2006 10:32 AM
To: Ray Marshall
Subject: Re: This morning's Ethanol message 2

Hi, it seems that much of the woes can be firmly put on the heads of Management.

Looking at airline firms that operate throughout the world except here one would wonder;
"what are they doing that we aren't?" Might be a place to start, how about pricing?

Jack

To: Jack

Good thoughts and comments, Jack!

Another lobbying group that should be getting together with the automobile industry is the Airline industry. I’m not sure what common ground they have, but maybe planes could fly on ethanol too? Or by taking the automobile demand away from the oil company supply, the price of “kerosene”, or whatever it is that jets burn, would drop.

Ray