The planes practically (can) fly themselves these days now anyway. Remove the ticket people, checking bags, food/drinks on the plane, and build a nice, efficient website for booking... Then structure your routes on flexible demand. Almost like crowdbuying tickets... There are probably a low number of people (outside business travel) that need to be somewhere at an exact time. Operate the ticket buying process like Massdrop. Let the collective decide when a plane takes off.

There's a lot of tweaks that could change the airline industry, but certainly no easy task.