"This is an industry where if you get your costs out of line and business is not so good, you're dead, " says Sam Peltzman, a University of Chicago business school economics professor who studies labor and the airline industry.

FORBES: United We Fall

"This is an industry where if you get your costs out of line and business is not so good, you're dead, " says Sam Peltzman, an economics professor at the University of Chicago business school who studies labor and the airline industry.

FORBES: United We Fall