And don't forget the newstarts have limited point-to-point route systems, no interlining, multitasking young staff, few inflight frills, limited infrastructure such as res centres, maintenance, elaborate FF programs, partnerships, transborder or international flights, and the many other overheads which the majors have. These are two very different beasts and cannot really be compared as similar entities other than they transport us from one select city to another. If you want to travel to 75% of the cities in the US, JetBlue or SouthWest will not get you there. If you want to go on to Canada or Mexico, or overseas, neither will interline you there at slightly more than the cost of getting to the nearest US gateway. I can go on, but you get the idea.

Just as low cost desktop computing made it possible for millions of homebased businesses to blossom over the past two decades, similar technological developments in the airline world have made these carriers possible, and the full service look like those big rooms of computers many of us remember from the 1970s that defined "the computer age" then.