"The addition of incremental fees means that if a passenger succeeds in getting a lower base fare than last year, their out-of-pocket expense actually ends up being higher," said Jamie Baker, an analyst at JPMorgan Chase.
In the late 1990s, FAA officials disguised as passengers repeatedly succeeded in smuggling guns and pipe bombs onto planes at Logan.
In this case, the passengers apparently succeeded in getting through a distress call to the Italian Coast Guard, which dispatched a Portuguese-flagged freighter, the King Jacob, to the rescue.
If the DOT appoints a fair-minded, collaborative advocate who understands the airline industry and listens to passengers, it will succeed.
And a system that does not succeed in drawing passengers out of their cars just adds buses to existing vehicles on the roads, making traffic and emissions worse.
What is certain is that in 1620, when the Mayflower was rounding into shoal waters near Cape Cod, there was little reason, apart from faith, to expect that the settlement its passengers hoped to found would succeed.
In an age of consolidation in the airline industry, Spirit, with about 1 percent of the nation's passenger traffic, has managed to succeed by going it alone, scraping for every dollar and scrimping on every cost.
When stopped, even if the passengers were found to be illegal immigrants, drivers would profess not to know the legal status of their passengers, and prosecutors doubted a charge would succeed.
Even if researchers succeed in creating a mammoth, passenger pigeon or other extinct creature, it has to survive in the wild.
Passengers must hope that such sensible measures will succeed in quelling the fears about batteries so that laptops are not banned from cabin bags.
