Summary: Like complaining about your crappy airline experiences? Mitch tackles the history of airline deregulation and tries to convince The Good Guys that things are not as bad as you think, and why everyone should LOVE baggage fees. We crown the king of the nerds as there is a clear winner from last episode’s pi challenge. Chad conjures up painful memories of elementary fitness tests with this episode’s challenge. Pi Challenge: Learn the Major Memory System to translate long series of numbers into phonetic sounds Secret weapon: http://www.sweetscape.com/010memorizer/ Mitch’s original mnemonic “story” (NSFW) Perek’s “piem” Main Pillar: Here is the quick analysis Mitch did on the price of the average airline ticket, as it relates to the underlying price of crude oil, one of the largest expenses that ticket prices need to cover: Source: Bureau of Transportation Statistics Source: inflationdata.com *The airfare prices are in 1995 dollars, and the crude oil prices are in 2010 dollars. The point of this isn’t to compare dollars to dollars, but to show that over the past 15 years, airline prices have gone down compared to the CPI, while oil prices have sky-rocketed. Remember that fuel prices now comprise 30-40% of airline’s expenses. Next Challenge: Yoga
