跟讀練習: Why The Airline Business Is Broken - 通過影片學習英語口語

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Investing in US airline carriers can be a risky move. Warren Buffett learned this the hard way, twice.

The airline industry is brutally ruthless. It makes a hockey game look like a kid's garden party.

Commercial airlines have historically struggled to deliver sustainable profitability. I think the stats would bear that out, especially pre pandemic.

But investors tend to stick with the sector despite the volatility.

You make a lot of money, a lot of people are millionaires. Can you lose a lot of money in there? Absolutely. So it's a high stakes game.

Over the long term these businesses can be profitable over short periods, you can run into challenges.

I mean, they're putting you in a metal tube, taking you up to 30 40,000 feet, and transporting you at hundreds and hundreds of miles an hour to get from point A to point B. And if you think about the substitutes for that service, like there really aren't any. So it's kind of surprising to me that an industry that delivers that kind of a service, and does it with like an absolutely impeccable operational and safety record is able to come under such pressure.

Airlines had a 10 year streak of profitability. And that was very quickly ended by the Covid 19 pandemic. And that was a crisis Airlines said had a larger impact than even the 9/11 attacks.

Airline stocks have been on a wild ride since December 2019.

Begging the question should investors steer clear of the sector? And if air travel is such an integral part of society and the economy? Why do passenger airlines struggle to stay profitable?

Airlines face many potential external risks that could impact a carrier's bottom line, we can break them down into two categories, price shocks and demand shocks. Price shocks are when an airline's operational costs suddenly shoot up due to extenuating factors.

You know the biggest and most obvious ones of these are oil prices that translate directly into jet fuel. Jet fuel is for most airlines their biggest expense, and it's one that's not always very easy to pass on to the customer. So as you start to see oil prices rise, that again comes right over the airlines profit loss statement.

The steep rise in oil prices in 2008 during the Great Recession created a price shock. Airfares trended downward despite fuel costs going up causing cash inflow problems for airlines carriers began unbundling airfares from other services like baggage checks, food and drink purchases, and flexible reservation changes in order to recoup the losses.

Part of the problem is tickets are sold in advance at a specific price in advance. And then the input cost that drive profitability can vary sometimes on a day to day basis.

Another example of a price shock is a sudden increase in labor costs such as what the industry experienced during the pandemic.

Airlines have told me that they have had to increase sometimes multiple times the starting wages for new hire employees. So depending on the price of jet fuel, it or labor can be the number one cost for an airline.

Demand shocks are when a big event has reduced the number of people flying. There have been a number of demand shocks in the past 20 years such as 9/11, the SARS outbreak, the Great Recession, swine flu and of course Covid. These events vary in severity but the industry took a hit from all of them.

Airlines are already operating on very thin margins, but when an event like that comes in the airlines really suffer.

In 2001 airline profits declined a little more than $12 billion compared to 2000. The Great Recession led to a profit swing of more than $40 billion, and the pandemic led to year over year losses of nearly $153 billion in 2020. Soon after 9/11, Congress approved a $15 billion bailout to help prop up the airlines as well as limit the carrier's liabilities in the wake of the attacks.

At the time, the 9/11 bailout was the largest airline bailout that we had ever seen.

The government stepped in again in 2020, as pandemic restrictions led to a huge decrease in travel demand.

Congress passed the Cares Act in late March 2020. The bill allocated about $50 billion in grants and loans for passenger airlines.

The government basically propped up the airlines until a point where hopefully we now have enough demand that the business can be sustainable again.

One of the key parts of the legislation is the payroll support program or PSP. The policy was created to prevent airlines from laying off or furloughing workers.

On the surface that might seem a bit strange because if they're flying less capacity, certainly they should be using less people and they should just lay off employees. It's not that simple.

Because the industry is so safety conscious. If a highly trained employee such as a pilot goes on leave, that person must go through weeks of retraining to make sure they're ready for commercial service again, which comes with added costs and complications.

So in terms of the payroll support programs that protection of pilots, mechanics, flight attendants and other grounds staff was was a big deal, because the rehiring costs could be painful for an industry that it lost billions.

But there was pushback to the 2020 bailout.

We have privatized the gains, and we socialize the losses. We seem to do it every single time.

Airlines had faced criticism, some Democrats said, you spent a lot of your cash on stock buybacks and dividends instead of a rainy day fund and raising worker wages.

The legislation included some restrictions to deal with these concerns.

There were limits on CEO compensation, salaries, bonuses, and things like that. And then airlines were prohibited from laying off any workers for a set period of time for each of those three bailout packages.

I think the government realized that with the massive evaporation of demand, that if they didn't somehow support the airlines, that there was a credible risk of failure by perhaps several airlines. And with that comes a lot more unemployment.

If airlines fail, who loses? If the national transportation system fails, who's the loser? Everybody in the country, including other countries that depend on us.

There's a whole spectrum of ways airlines go to market. But the two buckets that are broadly accepted are full service carriers and low cost carriers.

Full Service carriers are more business oriented. They operate out of hubs, which are central airports that many different commercial routes fly through in order to make connections easier. Think Delta, American Airlines and United these legacy carriers also tend to have more infrastructure within their business and operate several different types of aircrafts as well as provide services such as lounges and business class.

One shoe doesn't fit all. What about business class and versus first class versus coach. It's a marketplace and you shouldn't tell the customers what to buy, you got to give them the menu and tell them tell us what you want and we'll give it to you.

These models, however, are more expensive to run.

That adds quite a bit of fixed cost, but it also generally adds complexity, which makes it a little bit harder to be agile.

And puts them a little bit more exposed to both acute events and bigger ships in the market.

Low cost carriers on the other hand, run a more streamlined operation. Think Southwest, Spirit, and Allegiant Air. These carriers run an operation with lower overhead they typically have a simpler business model, use only one type of plane and unbundle amenities from ticket prices.

They've proven as a sector to be quite a bit more resilient to shocks in the past and the poster child for low cost carriers historically has been Southwest, and up until the pandemic they delivered 47 years of straight profitability.

The business models vary between these budget carriers. Spirit paved the way for the unbundling practice, while Southwest has a motto of bags fly for free, but Southwest keeps its cost low in other ways, such as only providing one class of service which means no business class. Regardless of the business model, all passenger airlines are very acid intensive. Every carrier must invest in things like aircrafts, facilities on the ground, training centers, labor, and making sure they meet government regulated safety standards.

For the vast majority of airlines. They're responding to what the market's telling them and there is a lot of demand for cheap airfares. So if you're trying to meet that passenger demand, you need to think about ways that you adjust your cost base to do that profitably.

The airline industry is highly regulated from a safety standpoint, but the government used to also regulate the business side of passenger airlines. Until the late 1970s, the government set and regulated airfares, which meant the airlines had to compete based on what services they offered rather than offering the lowest cost flights. The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 allowed airlines to set their own fares and routes without needing government approval.

After that period, we entered an era which we are still in where airlines are more competing on price. And because it's such a low margin business, airlines tried to pack as many people in a plane as possible, which has been the reason why leg room has shrunk on airplanes year after year.

The airline industry has struggled to be sustainably profitable for ever, but in particular in the US since the deregulation. It has had really high highs and really low lows.

Deregulation in '78 forced airlines to shift from basically utility type businesses to free market businesses and it was a brutal bloodletting.

The deregulation sent the industry into decades of upheaval and adjustments as the business practices shifted. The demand of the marketplace lead to a lot of airlines going out of business or restructuring their operations. There have been more than 200 bankruptcy filings since the industry was deregulated. According to Airlines for America But most of these bankruptcies were for chapter 11 proceedings, which allows a business to use the law to restructure the organization's assets and finances rather than to liquidate it.

When an airline goes bankrupt, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're not going to see that airline again. Airlines that we all fly on today, Delta, American, United, all of those airlines over the last 20 years have declared bankruptcy and gone through a restructuring process.

United was the first of the major airlines to file for Chapter 11 in December 2002. That kicked off a wave of Chapter 11 filings. US Airways filed in September 2004 and Delta and Northwest both filed on September 14, 2005.

Obviously, that's not a perfect solution, because you're asking your partners to sort of take some of the consequence of the restructuring. But it's been a way for airlines to sort of get back on their feet, protect those jobs, protect those assets, and rebuild in a way that is ultimately better for their shareholders, their employees and their customers.

They were coming out of bankruptcy looking for ways to get a bigger share of the market. They embarked on this big game of musical chairs where it wasn't clear exactly which airline was going to end up with which airline.

Delta purchase Northwest in 2008, putting pressure on the other airlines. After years of negotiations continental and united merged in 2010.

Continental as large as it was, was still the fourth or fifth largest airline in the US depending on how you measured it. And they needed scale.

And you saw Delta buy Northwest, let's say US Air merged with the United that'd be the end of it. So it was a kind of do something or be forever in fifth place, or fourth place, which is not a really sustainable goal.

Through consolidation we have seen airlines compete by not competing. In the Olympics doesn't matter how good you are, if you're number four or below, you're not getting one of those medals, and Wall Street want not just profitability, but they want to see a path towards sustained profitability.

By 2015 the consolidation led to what are now considered the Big Four airlines, Southwest, Delta, United and American Airlines. As of July 2021, those four airlines control about 65% of the US market. This strategy of consolidating paid off for airlines, at least for a while.

Coming out of the recession, consolidation in the US, has certainly contributed to the profitability of the airline industry, especially in the five or six years before Covid. When there were record levels of profit, the airlines paid down their balance sheets, for the most part, they reduced debt, they improved stockholder equity, but also they went about massive, massive changes in how they do business.

Analysts are widely expecting the industry to rebound in the next few years, but there are some caveats. The big question for analysts is when will people start flying again after the pandemic?

The business traveler who can be sometimes five times more profitable than a leisure traveler has been historically, the core customer for airlines. But the business traveler is not yet back in large numbers. And they won't be back until sometime domestically until probably 2023 2024 and the rest of the world 2024 2025. And some portion of business travel that existed before the pandemic is not coming back, we estimate right now it's probably 20% may not return even by 2025. So that's going to put more pressure on airlines to cater to leisure travelers.

Demand is definitely very important. What kind of price point type recovery is also very important. Assuming oil prices stay at these levels, Freising will probably stay elevated.

That might not be a great message for the consumer. But it's a better message for the shareholder.

There are pretty significant debt loads that have come along with a pandemic. Right now rates are pretty low, but they're probably heading up and they're facing issues in their supply chain like many other companies, and that includes, by the way, things like pilots. The airlines are in a better place than many people would have thought of, you know, early in the pandemic, which is not to say they're out of the woods but they've done a pretty good job of responding and addressing what would normally have been existential threats and finding a way to to weather through the worst of the storm.

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這段影片能幫你提升兩項關鍵口語技能：一是在複雜話題（如行業分析）中清晰表達邏輯的能力，二是模仿 native speaker 討論經濟現象時的語氣和節奏。通過練習，你能更自然地用英語闡述“高風險行業的盈利困境”這類抽象內容，尤其適合雅思口語練習中需要深入分析的題目。

注意這些語音現象

影片中存在大量連讀和弱讀現象。比如“brutally ruthless”中，“brutally”的尾音/l/與“ruthless”的開頭音/r/連讀，形成流暢的過渡；“sustainable profitability”裡，“sustainable”的尾音/bl/弱讀，突出“profitability”的重音。此外，“price shocks and demand shocks”中，“and”弱化為/ən/，符合口語中快速表達的習慣。這些語音細節是英語影子跟讀時需要重點捕捉的。

像母語者一樣表達

模仿 speaker 的節奏和重音是關鍵。影片中討論“航空公司成本結構”時，“jet fuel is for most airlines their biggest expense”一句，重音落在“jet fuel”“biggest expense”上，強調成本核心。而在列舉案例時，如“9/11, the SARS outbreak, the Great Recession”，語速稍快且語調平穩，體現資訊的連貫性。練習時可使用shadowing site，逐句跟讀並錄音對比，注意在“高風險”“薄利潤”等關鍵詞上加重語氣，同時保持整體語流的自然。通過這種方式，你能逐步掌握英語口語中“分析性表達”的韻律，提升看YouTube學英語的效率。

影片中的語法

說話人最常用的結構，並附上影片中的原話：

結構	影片中的用法
現在完成時 have/has + 過去分詞 — 過去發生但與現在仍有關聯的事	have been · have told · has reduced
定語從句 who / which + 從句 — 補充說明人或事物	hubs, which are · complexity, which makes · service which means
被動語態 be + 過去分詞 — 強調發生了什麼，而不是誰做的	are sold · was created · were prohibited

什麼是跟讀法？

跟讀法 (Shadowing) 是一種有科學依據的語言學習技巧，最初開發用於專業口譯員的培訓，並由多語言者Alexander Arguelles博士普及。這個方法簡單而強大：您在聽英語母語原聲的同時立即大聲重複——就像是一個延遲1-2秒緊跟說話者的影子。與被動聽力或語法練習不同，跟讀法強迫您的大腦和口腔肌肉同時處理並模模擬實的講話模式。研究表明它能顯著提高發音準確性，語調，節奏，連讀，聽力理解和口語流利度——使其成為雅思口語備考和真實英語交流最有效的方法之一。

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跟讀練習: Why The Airline Business Is Broken - 通過影片學習英語口語

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你能學到什麼

注意這些語音現象

像母語者一樣表達

影片中的語法

什麼是跟讀法？