I'm a big believer in that most of what we see on the news is a bunch of bullcrap and is there to push some sort of political agenda or to justify the raising of prices on something or other. I don't really feel as though anything that we see has any real bearing on the real world.
People will talk about a fuel crisis that is coming from the dealio in Iran and every now and then a story will pop up about a particular country that is rationing fuel or preserving their jet fuel because they claim they don't have access to any more of it, but at the same time the prices of all the flights I have taken or even looked at remain at the same levels they were 2-10 years ago. in many situations the prices have even gone DOWN and this is before we even start to factor in things like inflation.
So is there a real fuel crisis? I tend to think there isn't one.
I took that picture from an article entitled "can a commercial airplane do a barrel roll?" It's pretty interesting and if you want to read it you can do so HERE.. The short answer, surprisingly, is "yes."
Anyway, back to the matter at hand. I frequently travel over the Pacific from Japan to Mexico and the other way around as well. This flight is one of the more expensive long-haul flights in the world because traversing the entire Pacific ocean is no small feat. One would think that if there was a genuine fuel crisis that this flight would be one of the first to go up in price seeing as how only a handful of carriers so much as offer it.
No matter how you slice this flight it is going to take around 20 hours including a normally unavoidable layover somewhere. This flight has always cost around $600 ever since I started doing them a long time ago. The price right now, depending on what day of the week you take it, is around guess what? Yeah, it's around 6-700 dollars.
Now I will admit that I don't know what Zipair is and with a name like that I can probably guess that it isn't the most luxurious airline in the world but I looked them up a tiny bit and found out that they still have a very high luggage weight allowance and the only downside that I can see is that they don't have in-flight entertainment on the back of headrests like a lot of other planes do. I think that I speak for most of humanity when I say that we all have our own portable electronics for this now and we do not need the airlines to provide them so who cares?
The other thing is that you have to pre-order meals and well, I can see how this would be a nuisance for people that were not paying attention but let's again be honest here: Are meals on your flight something that you really look forward to? I bet in business class it can be wonderful but back in steerage where I can afford to fly it is normally a plate of slop that I don't really want anyway. These airlines allow you to bring on your own food and well, you should! On a trans-pacific flight how many meals do you actually need anyway?
So I guess the cost is kept the same in part because of these two changes but I don't really care about that. Do you?
If there was a genuine fuel crisis these airlines wouldn't really have a choice but to charge prices through the roof and well, that simply isn't happening. There is a lot of fear mongering on the news about this conflict and that one and how there is limited jet fuel available in the world but I'm afraid I just don't buy it.
I spend most of my year in Mexico and Central America and the flight prices change only because of holidays like New Year and Christmas. This has always been the case.
One of two things is happening here based on my real-life experience: Either the airlines are going out of their way to be super nice to us and keep costs low to help out the common traveling man, or there is no real impact on their ability to obtain fuel. Which do you think it is?
