Billion-dollar airline routes

depends on the flight. In most cases there is somewhere to put your bag. If you can tell it's going to be absolutely full then maybe it's worth it

we have a number of airline credit cards that give us free check-in, which is way less stressful on both departure and arrival procedure. So i can minimize the time spent sitting inches from strangers in a seat that is too small for me.

First, business and premium class usually have plenty of overhead space. Nowadays as long as you’re not flying “basic economy” you’ll probably get overhead space, even regular economy. Besides even if I miss overhead bins, I can pack the bag under my seat.

This is fascinating!

A few comments have mentioned the cost to the airline for running the route - the author talks about revenue, not profit - but most, if not all the costs are calculated on time, not distance.

Nearly everything in an aircraft has a maintenance window / shelf life measured in minutes / hours / days / months / years. The JFK - LON route could be 7 hours, or 5 hours depending on prevailing winds.

That’s an extra 2 hours you have to pay the flight crew, run the engines, maybe even an extra meal for the passengers and so forth.

Weather has an astounding affect on how much a given flight will cost, and probably traffic is the next one - hence why landing / gate spots at busy airports are so expensive.

Crew are legally mandated to only work X hours in a given time frame (both active and standby), so if you’re held up in the air or on the ground, especially on a long haul flight - you might not be legally clear to make that flight!

There’s a whole field of dispatch operations for aviation that handles this, and for the finance folks - the financial model for aviation is just subtly different enough to cause a few headaches if you’re not aware.

There's still money on the table for airline operators where routes are concerned. It sounds a bit fringe, but most of these flights take off and land at airports in large cities. International airports are often zoned around industrial centers that are typically set off away from the city core. Coupled with the high frequency of inbound and outbound traffic depending on the airport, commercial flights are excellent candidates for capturing high resolution aerial imagery in near-real time. In many cases, those images can be transmitted back down while the plane is in the air thanks to in-flight internet.

There have been past attempts to harness the passive residual capabilities of air travel for photography, but none have stuck based on the difficulty of scaling such a system. If successful, crowdsourced aerial photography for cartography could add a layer of temporal resolution we just can't achieve with fewer than 500 imaging satellites currently in orbit, and for 1/10,000th the cost of satellite-based imaging. Add on concerns about LEO crowding and the thousands of use cases near-real-time aerial imaging could provide at a fraction of the cost, it becomes an interesting problem to solve.

There are plenty of barriers to this kind of scheme, regulation in particular, that could keep airlines from participating; the first major carrier who does, however, may find themselves with a new multi-billion dollar revenue stream.

(Disclosure: Founder @ https://notasatellite.com)