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Comment by klausjensen | Hacker News Reader

>Airlines need to make big profits in good years - they lose money like crazy in bad years. I don't know if it's still true, but at one time if you subtracted all the money US airlines lost from the money they made since the beginning of the industry you'd have a negative number.

Famously, Richard Branson once said:

If you want to be a Millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline.

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However, Branson (Virgin) has three of them. https://www.virgin.com/gateways/virginairlines

Virigin tend to take small ownership stakes in companies and just lease their name and branding out to them. In the case of Airlines they own 25% of Virgin America, 51% of Virgin Atlantic and 10% of Virgin Australia.

25% is the maximum "aliens" can own or vote in an airline flying domestically in the US, so while it might be a small stake, it's also the largest possible stake.

In which years did American Airlines last lose $24billion (or its equivalent accounting for inflation). Or do they have long streaks of smaller losses?

There is a small miscommunication here. It's America's airlines (the entire industry) not American Airlines (the company).

This article from November last year has more details: http://priceonomics.com/can-airlines-make-money/

> Overall, the industry has lost $35 billion since deregulation.

So in the last year alone, they made back 2/3rd of what they lost in the last 30 years?

Nominal dollars gets tough to think about. You should probably normalize to 2015 dollars and recalculate.

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