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>The airlines are shafting customers while making more money than ever before.

Air travel in the US is hardly a lucrative business. It's a tough racket:

"Domestic passenger airline operations lost $10 billion from 1979 to 1989, made profits of $5 billion in the 1990s and lost $54 billion from 2000 to 2009. To put these numbers in context, at the end of 2009, the entire book value of U.S. passenger carriers’ assets was about $163 billion and the book value of shareholder equity was $10 billion. Even at the end of 2000, after six consecutive profitable years, their assets were $159 billion and shareholder equity was $40 billion."

http://freakonomics.com/2011/06/24/why-do-airlines-always-lo...

> If it was a honest competitive market the fuel cost savings would be passed on to the customers.

This, in fact, did happen during the oil boom of the mid-to-late 2000s. Southwest had the foresight to purchase a ton of oil futures back when it was cheap, and nearly slaughtered the primary carriers by pricing fares at levels they couldn't hope to match in the current market.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/business/worldbusiness/28i...

With respect to "shafting consumers," airfare is cheaper than it's ever been. And if you've ever followed the market, airlines have rarely been steady bastions of profit like banks or (recently) Apple or Google - it seemed like at least one was going bankrupt every year until recently.

http://www.aei.org/publication/even-with-baggage-fees-the-mi...

Spirit is the US equivalent of Ryanair.

http://www.spirit.com/ http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/02/14/276973956/episode-...

United Airlines, for instance, made about a 3% profit in 2014. Not exactly raking in the dough.

https://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=UAL+Income+Statement&annual

No discussion is complete without Philip Greenspun's piece on unions and airlines: http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines