Don't forget about taxes and fees. When you look at the price of a domestic (US) ticket, it's surprising how much of this is taxes and fees that the airline is passing through and not directly profit.
They are expenses, and like all expenses they are the business's problem, not yours. Somehow, people are conditioned to think that they should pay the airline's taxes (some of them) and 'fees' for them, and somehow customers mentally remove that from the bottom line price. If only they could get customers to believe they should cover other expenses, like income taxes, fuel (oh yeah, they did that), maintenance, and lunch the other day with the Boeing salesperson, they could itemize those too. And where are the discounts when the expenses are less than expected? When profits are high? Oh, suddenly that's their business, not mine.
The pro tip is this, for anything: Just look at the bottom line. Businesses can itemize things however they want, including discounts ('special for you today - 50% off!'), the price of item A can be marked up, the price of item B marked down, it's all meaningless.
For example, it cost $950 to travel over Afghanistan in 2020. [1]
[1] https://simpleflying.com/overflight-fees/
Faa’s fees for the US: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/international_aviation/overf...
Seems fuel taxes are next to nothing? Not sure how to read this...
Since a plane can easily fly from country to country, any country who taxed airline fuel would simply deter planes from visiting.
Probably the biggest climate move that could have happened at COP26 would have been a global agreement on $1/liter aircraft fuel tax. But it didn't happen.
Carrying extra weight is bad and causes more CO2.