Airlines struggle as the price of oil soars

Currently you can't open a newspaper or click to a Web site without stumbling across one or more front-page stories about the airlines. The situation has made headlines in several ways over the past year or so. From Bankruptcies, safety scandals, fuel woes, you name it, there have been all kinds of issues that airlines seem to be dealing with. The major trend here is that all of these situations are negatives.For carriers the future looks uncertain at best, nightmarish at worst. This time the potential situation may be completely devastating. The culprit nowadays is the rising price of petroleum. Jim May, president of the Air Transport Association, says that soaring fuel prices are "the worst economic shock since 9/11, and, possibly, one that is worse." The cost of jet fuel has gone up 70 percent in the past year alone. A week ago oil hit $125 a barrel, and in some corners of the globe a gallon of this fuel is selling for upward of $6. Five years ago, the average cost per gallon was less than 86 cents. Ten years ago, it was 51 cents.The past year's increases have already impacted the world's airlines to the tune of $65 billion. Experts say they don't know how bad things may possibly get. There's a decent chance that oil will climb past $200 a barrel, at which point the airlines will face massive realignment. Fuel makes up the biggest piece of an airline's cost, a bigger cut than labor, aircraft leases or anything else. This is what makes the situation such a challenging issue. As discussed here in the past, weaning commercial aviation away from fossil fuels will be a long and challenging process, if it happens at all. Airplanes, unlike cars, are already extremely efficient. With employee wages and benefits already decreased long ago, airlines have no choice but to pass these costs along to customers. All in all, I find that this is a situation that has no end in sight. Airlines will be struggling to find a way to provide cheaper fuel to their planes for quite sometime. I don't believe that things will change until the U.S. finally finds an efficient fuel alternative to petroleum based gasoline. Flyers are going to have to find alternative methods of transportation in order to escape the wrath of out of control airline prices.