Besides the obvious cost of acquiring multi-million dollar jetliners (which, if bought new, typically have to be ordered 5-10 years in advance of delivery) and signing leases for gate space and hiring ground crew at airports and so on?
You also need FAA and TSA approved operations plans, adding for instance the cost of screening all your employees and equipping your planes with things like black boxes and weather radar.
Then you end up like Virgin America, who can't fly to Chicago because the incumbent carriers there claim there are no available gates at O'Hare (despite the number of flights in and out of the airport being down like 10-20% from previous peak).
Doesn't seem that high to me...
One webpage I found suggests the lease price for a 737 is between $50,000 - $100,000 per month (which seems reasonable, or maybe a little low). Wikipedia says YouTube's bandwidth costs are estimated at $1M per day, so the hardware cost of a couple aircraft doesn't seem all that expensive.
(Disclaimer: I know almost nothing about commercial aviation.)
Is the barrier actually high? (I see new airlines every so often.)
What are the actual barriers? If they're govt, why isn't reducing the barriers the right response?
> So I'd settle for a government mandate of how high commercial airlines can fly.
And govt would get it right because that's what they do.
Didn't we just have a nice discussion of regulatory capture? (My favorite comment was by someone who thought that regulatory capture was the act of promotiing govt power grabs.)