Originally Posted by
superangrypenguin
Thanks for sharing. I didn't know that there were armed air marshals on AC flights. How did it possibly cost $100 million?? That's $20 million per year! HOW? Unless there were armed air marshals for every flight or something like that?
AC's probably quoting full-J fares for every seat they take up in J. If you figure full-J will probably cost on the order of $1/seat mile for domestic and Int'l itineraries, and AC's average flight being in the 1000 mile range, that's only 55k miles per day. At 3000 miles/day/air marshall, we're probably only talking about 20 air marshalls working per day throughout the entire system.
The government probably could (should) negotiate AC down to what AC would realistically be able to sell the seats for (ie: 3X RASM, which would be closer to 50 cents). But then pay up. The government collects crazy amounts from airport rents and other fees on air tickets -- they should be paying the costs of these mandated air marshalls.