As airlines have maximized capacity and slashed services, passengers have learned to brace themselves for packed planes, stuffed overhead bins, harried flight attendants and fees for everything from pretzels to pillows.
The airline has been adding flight capacity and slashing fares to get customers aboard, meaning overall passenger numbers have only dropped by 0.3% year on year.
Firms, struggling under a mountain of debt and excess capacity, are slashing investment, and exports to the rest of Asia are falling.
By then Iberia's network capacity would be slashed by 15%.
This, it says, has allowed prices to shoot upwards and slashed capacity margins, which are "so tight that National Grid's emergency power deals have become the norm".
Coal-fired power capacity will be slashed by 60 gigawatts (GW) by 2016, "more than double" 2012 predictions, while last year nuclear plants were being retired at an "unprecedented rate" with "more on the way" - largely due to issues with "profitability".
Passengers flocked to Ryanair and its rival easyJet, which embarked on similar aggressive discounting.The reaction of the big, established network carriers in Europe and America was quite the opposite: they slashed capacity by 15-20%, anticipating (correctly) a slump in their passenger numbers.
When war broke out in 1991, BA quickly cut 4,600 jobs (without any forced redundancies) and stood down a further 2,000 staff on half-pay for a year.The world's favourite cost-cutterAfter September 11th, Mr Eddington cut 7,000 jobs immediately, slashed capacity by 10% and launched a review of the "future size and shape" of BA.
According to David Thursfield, chairman of Ford of Europe, capacity has been slashed, factories are 95% full and $2 billion will soon be sliced from its parts bill.But the daunting challenge is in America, where Ford is still caught in the aftermath of the Firestone fiasco two years ago, when it had to recall millions of vehicles with faulty tyres.
