"If you look at something like a Boeing 747 -- that's over a quarter of a billion dollars, buying a 747," he said. "You need two of them for a round trip. But nobody is paying half a billion dollars to fly from L.A. to London. It's a few thousand dollars, and that's because you reuse that aircraft multiple times, you use it thousands of times."

Airlines have always been subsidised by taxpayers, in fact air travel has never been super profitable even with the subsidies.