Well, not quite. If you read relevant articles in the trade press, you can get some feel for the ideas and the thinking behind it. But it's complex. Revenue management / yield management departments are, I think, stuffed full of mathematicians doing stuff that's so advanced that it would make my head hurt.

For a very quick skim over some of the possible considerations, you might want to have a look at Sixth Freedom's posts in this thread - http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/briti...ost-money.html - but remember that all of the figures are fictional and that what really goes on in any particular airline will be held pretty closely. It's also worth bearing in mind the repeated references here to the fights between short-haul and long-haul over revenue and cost allocation, which can have a bearing on the analysis of whether a particular fare can be regarded as profitable or not.