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A comment on A 1958 UNIVAC airline reservation system. Parent comment

Re:A 1958 UNIVAC airline reservation system by ghaff on Saturday November 06, 2021 @06:48PM (#29134573)
I don't know if it's still true. Probably not. But at one point in the past 10 or 15 years I heard the (what seemed to me credible) claim that, taken as a whole, the commercial airline industry had never made money.
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Re:A 1958 UNIVAC airline reservation system by nradov on Saturday November 06, 2021 @07:00PM (#29134652)
The worst sort of business is one that grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender the growth, and then earns little or no money. Think airlines. Here a durable competitive advantage has proven elusive ever since the days of the Wright Brothers. Indeed, if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down.

-- Warren Buffett, in the 2007 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letter

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Re:A 1958 UNIVAC airline reservation system by bobthepanda on Saturday November 06, 2021 @10:10PM (#29135887)
COVID was easily the worst thing that has happened to the airline industry bar none. ICAO estimates that 2020 resulted in $371B in losses.
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