similarmy, ceo of fair compare.com. rick, i can remember years ago you get on a plane frequently plenty of empty seats. you are lucky you could stretch out, get three coach seats together. every plane i get on is full every seat taken. what changed? well there s a huge seat change. before prior to the great recession, sort of the precursor of the fuel crisis that occurred right before the great recession, you had a group of executives for two decades that basically had a grow or die strategy. part of that was steal market share, add more routes and basically you had aircraft that had a third empty seats on them until this time. now it is the fuel crisis the recession hits you have a whole crop of new executives that come in. they are basically survive, contract consolidate, don t add. cut unprofitable routes.
one another to limit seat capacity to drive up ticket prices. justice department officials decline to specify which airlines are investigated but the four largest airlines american, dell tarks and southwest all confirm they are part of the investigation and they are cooperating. connecticut senator richard blumenthal called for the federal investigation. the term maintaining capacity discipline is a code word that the airlines use to tell each other they are going to constrain the number of flights. and it s pretty simple economics 101. reduce supply, and have increasing demand. you are going to have price increases. that s what consumers have been suffering. joining us now is dr. megan ryer son, assistant transportation at university of pennsylvania. and also joining us rick