{"id":9161,"date":"2014-09-17T17:07:17","date_gmt":"2014-09-17T21:07:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/?p=9161"},"modified":"2022-08-01T07:43:06","modified_gmt":"2022-08-01T11:43:06","slug":"flying-for-dollars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/2014\/09\/flying-for-dollars\/","title":{"rendered":"Flying for Dollars"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ll take Flying for $300, Alex.\u00a0 The Answer — 15.3 cents.\u00a0 The Question — What was the average airfare paid per mile<\/a> last year, for all domestic flights in the United States?<\/p>\n

Yes, I thought 15 cents was sort of low, myself.\u00a0 So I priced a few non-stop regional flights between some Eastern U.S. cities selected at random.\u00a0 Here are the round-trip air miles and fares for one person, departing Tuesday, October 28 and returning Tuesday, November 4:<\/p>\n

 Asheville to Newark       $354     1198 miles     29.5 cents\/mile\r\n Cleveland to Boston       $336     1126 miles     29.8 cents\/mile\r\n Richmond to Atlanta       $194      962 miles     20.2 cents\/mile\r\n Pittsburgh to St. Louis   $224     1106 miles     20.3 cents\/mile\r\n<\/pre>\n
The first two flights in the list cost almost twice the U.S. average, on a cents-per-mile basis.\u00a0 And while the other two flights are less expensive, they too are higher than the average.<\/p>\n
If my randomly selected flights are more expensive than the average, then someone else has to be flying the cheap flights.\u00a0 We need look no further than the 4490-mile round-trip flight between JFK and LAX — for the same dates, the fare would be $316, or 6.4 cents per mile.\u00a0 This hardly covers<\/a> the cost of the fuel.\u00a0 What gives?<\/p>\n
On to Final Jeopardy.\u00a0 Category — A Midsummer Flight’s Dream.\u00a0 The Answer —\u00a0 Forsooth, I fear not.\u00a0 The Question — Verily, are these fares fair?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ll take Flying for $300, Alex.\u00a0 The Answer — 15.3 cents.\u00a0 The Question — What was the average airfare paid per mile last year, for all domestic flights in the United States? Yes, I thought 15 cents was sort of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9161"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9176,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9161\/revisions\/9176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}