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

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