BuckeyeBlog

The Plain Dealer reports today that airlines are cutting capacity to deal with high fuel prices. While this doesn’t necessarily reflect lower passenger demand, as the newspaper points out, it does indicate something else: increased efficiency. Airlines are going to great lengths to use fuel more sparingly:

The fuel pressure has become so intense that airlines are taking steps that would have seemed absurd a year ago. US Airways said this week that it would no longer show movies so it can get the weight of movie equipment off its planes, saving $10 million a year in fuel costs. US Airways and United repainted their aircraft from dark blues and grays to white, which weighs less.

While the Plain Dealer thinks these measures would have seemed “absurd” a year ago, they really should be viewed as wise, no matter when they are made. Our nation’s first billionaire, John D. Rockefeller, certainly held this view. Rockefeller invested time and money into finding a way to decrease the drops of solder used to seal tins of kerosene from 40 drops each to…39 drops each. Surely this fits the Plain Dealer’s definition of absurd, but it saved Rockefeller hundreds of thousands of dollars and helped his company obtain a 60% world market share by offering the lowest-cost product to consumers.

This article shows yet again the beauty of the market and freely adjusting prices; airlines have increased their efficiency and reduced their demand for oil. This can be done in many economic systems, but only in a free market can it be done voluntarily while still keeping the customer’s comfort in mind. After all, if they squeeze too many passengers into a plane, those passengers can voluntarily change their methods of travel.

Tags: airplane, energy, fuel prices

This entry was posted on Friday, July 11th, 2008 at 9:34 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.