Like many other critics of cars, you seem to implicitly consider the value of travellers' time to be negligible, so that you don't need to consider it even in a context where they are talking about a cost meter ticking at 8 cents per minute or so.
There are annoying rhetorical tricks in the other direction employed by fans of cars, like pointedly ignoring the cost of pollution or pointedly pretending that expensive required-by-law facilities (notably parking) are not costs. But as much as those pro-car rhetorical tricks distort reality, they seldom seem to distort the reality of the situation as badly as the anti-car trick of treating the value of the traveller's time as negligible. Across the people who can afford to travel by car, "negligible compared to $4.80/hr" is an extremely bad approximation for the value of time.
The car is the most inefficient, economically infeasible mode of transit known to human kind. For distances over 20 miles, if you can't beat car travel for a family of 4 (about 8 cents per mile per person) you suck at your job.
Airlines should be aiming for $0.05 per mile per person. If you pack people that tightly, there's no reason that it shouldn't be possible. European airlines do it. Fire deadwood (start with your 389 VPs) until you can deliver a fair price.
Last minute tickets and upper class tickets subsidize "cheap" fares.
There are the "gamey" cheap fares ($25 for NYC-LAX) that obviously exist to draw people in but don't actually produce profit, and then there are reasonably cheap ones ($150-300) on which the airline still makes a profit. There's no reason the latter needs to be offset by outright robbery (which the last-minute effect is).
The problem with the airlines is that they aren't even good at being greedy. They need to be bailed out every 3 years or so. If they were making "too much" profit, the solution would be obvious: buy their stock. But that's not the problem. The reason the tickets are so expensive is that they have hundreds of unnecessary executives paid 6- and 7-figure salaries to do absolutely nothing.