American, Delta and United collectively generated over $170 billion in revenue in 2025. Yet for every dollar that comes in, airlines keep just four cents in profit. Understanding how the other 96 cents gets consumed explains why the airline business remains, as Warren Buffett put it, "the worst sort of business … one that grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender the growth, and then earns little or no money." Here is how a single dollar of airline revenue gets

A landmark piece of federal legislation introduced last week could fundamentally reshape the American trucking industry by allowing autonomous freight trucks to generate revenue while still in their testing phase. The Self Drive Act of 2026, formally introduced on February 5 by Rep. Bob Latta (R-Ohio), grants the Secretary of Transportation explicit authority to permit manufacturers and fleet operators to conduct "limited commercial operations" under a testing permit — a firs

Our guest has spent over two decades analyzing airline balance sheets, advising institutional investors, national publications and watching carriers rise and fall. They agreed to speak candidly on the condition of anonymity so they could say what they really thought without the constraints of their organization.  Q: Airlines keep posting record or near-record profits, yet every earnings call is full of talk about "discipline"; capacity discipline, cost discipline, capital dis

It is the most ambitious piece of maritime legislation since Richard Nixon was in the White House, and it arrived with something rare in Washington: genuine bipartisan backing. The SHIPS for America Act, championed by Senators Mark Kelly and Todd Young alongside Representatives Garamendi and Trent Kelly, sets a blunt national target — 250 new US-flagged vessels added to the international fleet within a decade. The problem is the country that once built liberty ships by the th