This article by Scott McCartney at the WSJ is so spot-on that I’m front-paging it here on the blog, as well as posting a link over on the discussion board.

Flying Stinks — Especially for the Airlines:

You can fly between New York and Los Angeles for as little as $370 round-trip, not including taxes and government fees, on JetBlue, and $20 more on American. And out of that, how much will the airline spend on fuel?

Almost $300 per passenger for JetBlue at current prices, and nearly $500 for American. Just Friday’s $10.75 leap in oil prices would raise the cost to JetBlue Airways Corp. to fly someone from New York to Los Angeles and back by almost $24.

While most consumers know all too well how much it costs to gas up their cars, few know how much they are paying for gas when they fly on an airline. It turns out to be shockingly high at today’s prices — well more than half the cost of the average ticket on many routes.

That doesn’t leave a lot of money to pay for all the other costs of running an airline — labor, airplanes, maintenance, insurance, landing fees, facilities and managers. And it goes a long way toward explaining why air travel has gotten so miserable for consumers, as airlines slash service, raise prices, pile on fees and nickel-and-dime in multiple ways. One tiny measure of the travel morass: JetBlue stopped giving away free headsets to watch its free television on June 1. Headsets now cost $1 (you can bring your own earphones).

Most other changes are far more disruptive to travelers. With airlines planning to ground airplanes and erase flights from schedules beginning in the fall in order to drive ticket prices up, the high fuel cost per passenger may well limit the opportunity of Americans to fly cheap, something millions have enjoyed for many years. Jet travel may return to its early days as something more of a luxury to be consumed sparingly.

…

Oliver Wyman analyzed the average trip on the average plane for U.S. carriers and found a per-passenger fuel cost of $137.60 round-trip, with oil prices at $135 a barrel. The current average round-trip domestic fare in the U.S., factoring in discount airlines and network carriers, is estimated at about $263, not including government taxes and fees. On average for U.S. airlines, more than half of the fare they get buys fuel.

That’s a staggering amount when just four years ago fuel costs sucked up only 10% to 20% of tickets. When fuel was $75 a barrel last year, the average fuel bill was less than 30% of the average ticket price. Today’s higher prices mean airlines have to get about $60 round-trip out of the average passenger over last year’s prices to cover the higher fuel costs — thus the flurry of baggage fees, fare increases and other means of wringing more bucks out of customers.

Please go read it all.

McCartney does a terrific job of bringing hard data into the discussion. It’s not information that the airlines will feel good about (not that any of it is news to them), but for anyone interested in the effects of the end of cheap oil on civilian airplane travel, it’s a Must Read.

And yes, the numbers he presents also support my running contention (e.g. Airlines, Apocalypticons, and the rest of us) that the airline business will be squeezed by current and future oil prices down to a sliver of its current size–the “boutique industry” I keep talking about.

This is also a very good item to send to your friends and relatives who are just catching on that there’s a lot more to the price of oil than what they personally pay at the gas pump.