You're Flying Me Crazy

US Air just announced that they are dropping inflight entertainment from all domestic flights.  According to the article inflight entertainment systems are simply too heavy and removing them will save the company $10MM a year in fuel costs.

Airlines executives want us to believe that fuel costs and labor unions are the reasons why their companies are failing and that it has nothing to do with gross mismanagement or making consumer unfriendly choices.  Like taking out inflight entertainment.

I know absolutely nothing about running an airline or US Air's operations.  But I do have Wikipedia and a calculator.

According to the US Air Wikipedia entry the airline has 3,500 daily flights.  The also have their fleet size:

• 196 - A319/320/321s
• 9 - A330s
• 81 - 737s
• 42 - 757s
• 10 - 767s  
• 16 - Embraer 190s  

Only 3% of their fleet are wide-body aircraft (A330s and 767s).  According to the article they're leaving entertainment on the wide-bodies.  Let's assume that their flights are proportional to fleet size (this likely overestimates the number of wide-body flights because they are longer flights).  This means US Air will have 3,395 flights a day or 1,239,175 a year that are losing inflight entertainment.  This equates to a saving of $8.07 per flight.

Using the airplane configuration information, the average narrow body plane has 132 coach seats on it.  This means that US Air is saving $0.06 per passenger by taking out inflight entertainment.  Remember: this isn't US Air charging for the service, they are flat removing the equipment.

This of course assumes that no revenue will be lost from passengers choosing a different airline and that there will be no cost associated with removing the equipment.

As I said, above, I don't know much about running an airline, but I struggle to see how this can be anything but shortsighted anti-customer decisions caused by gross incompetence in management.