I'm still in shock about the 'just dumb' move by US. I know the issues the airlines face. I too run a large business and face similar issues each day.

However, I learned along time ago that your best customers need to be taken care of. Taken care of fairly, but taken care of.

The funny thing that never seems to creap into the financial converstion when talking about ailine profitability is this. When do most people pay for services rendered?

Think about it for a minute. Do you pay for your hotel room in advance? Do you pay the lawn sevice in advance? No!

However, some business need advance warning to schedule services and accomodations based on the costly variables that are involved. Agreed!

However, lets look at a conservative cash flow fact for a mid-size airline. If the airline had 1,000 flights a day, with maybe 90 passengers on each flight, 70% were booked 21-30 days in advance and the average ticket was $250. That is advance monies of $15,750,000. Now, consider that an airline could collect this amount each day for 21 days before it acually performed a service. Lets see $15,750,000 @ 21 days thats $330,750,000.

I wonder what kind of interest rate that would demand? 5%,7%,10%? Will just using 5% would bring $16,500,000 in interest for 30 days.

Hummmmmm. Something is terribly wrong!