But Parker also sees a smaller industry

US Airways last week reported a second quarter loss of $567 million, compared with a gain of $263 million for the same period in 2007, but CEO Doug Parker sounded somewhat upbeat in an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer. Although he conceded that the airline industry is facing “desperate times,” he predicted that US Airways will survive the current turmoil, and he discounted warnings by some industry observers that multiple bankruptcies and failures among the nation’s largest airlines could be in the offing. “We’re not going to have a cataclysmic liquidation of a big-six carrier, as some suggest,” Parker told the newspaper. “The industry will work it out, and there will still be six of us, but six smaller airlines.” In his view, Parker said, airlines will survive the crisis by shrinking their systems and continuing to raise fares and fees. He predicted that the cost of a typical airline ticket will jump to $650-$700 in the months to come (it was $332 in the first quarter of 2008, according to government figures); that airlines will continue to drop service to smaller cities; and that the number of domestic flights will continue to shrink. In essence, many of the changes brought about by airline deregulation in 1978 will be reversed. “It will have a huge impact upon our economy and upon the way Americans live. It’s going to be that severe,” Parker told the newspaper. US Airways itself will trim domestic capacity by 6 to 8 percent in the fourth quarter of this year and another 7-9 percent in 2009; it is eliminating 25 percent of its Las Vegas flights and 10 percent of its Phoenix schedule, but only 2 to 3 percent of its Philadelphia hub capacity this fall.