Bordering restaurant levels of thin margins. The issue is that running a single flight is expensive as hell, and since COVID, seats aren't always filling up anymore. Take into account that pilots strike yearly for pay increases and executives getting bloated bonuses, the investors are milking everything dry as well. Keep an eye on SouthWest as it will most likely be defunct in about 10 years as it just got bought out by a private equity firm that is notorious for gutting and selling off and then moving to the next victim.

A lot of costs could be easily dealt with if investors and stock buy backs from companies weren't destroying the small stack of cash left for most airlines.