The Economics of Owning an Airline

There's an old joke in aviation: the easiest way to become a millionaire is to start as a billionaire and buy an airline. In this video, we break down the brutal economics of the most famous money-losing business on Earth — from $117 million jets nobody actually buys, to razor-thin margins of $7.90 per passenger, to the strange reason investors value the flying part of an airline at less than zero. The real business was never the planes. It's the miles.