Amazon.com description: Product Description: About the Book--
Since deregulation in 1978, airlines have undergone profound changes. And, much has changed since the first edition of this book was published in 1997. In the first decade of the New Millennium, the airlines are in dire straits and stuggling to recover from the worst economic crisis in their entire history. The trauma was brought on by a series of setbacks that began with airline deregulation, followed by a rash of consumer complaints and safety concers, constrained airport capacity resulting in inordinate traffic delays, economic recessions and spikes in oil prices, two wars in the Middle East, and topped off by acts of terrorism around the world and a system now constrained by heightened alert and enhanced security procedures.
Legacy airlines are facing the possibility of extinction unless they can successfully reorganize to combat a proliferation of low-cost carreirs. Yet the new, low-cost point-to-point model is only a partial answer. As described in this book, the emerging air transportation system is evolving into six principal market niches. Airports, too, are evolving to conform to the carriers that use them. Likewise, the countervailing forces driving the production of aircraft into the future are frequency versus capacity, speed versus efficiency and safety, customer service and cost. Which of these alternatives to pursue is at the heart of the strategic struggle for dominance between Airbus and Boeing.
This book is a companion volume in an Air Transport Series, comprised of Air Transportation: Foundations for the 21st Centruy, 2nd ed. and Airline Management: Stategies for the 21st Century, 2nd ed. It is the purpose of this series to acquaint the reader with the principal elements of air transportation hsitory, airline economics, business, finance, marketing, regulation, and management--to bring all the essential elements of commercial aviation within the two-volume series.