At airline-industry conferences, you can pretty confidently bet that some luncheon speaker will sagely intone something along the lines of: “In the world of aviation, the only constant is change.” Well, not anymore. Love it or hate it (polls say more folks hate it), the way we fly today, our air-travel experience, isn’t likely to change fundamentally for years to come. Whether this “new normal” will improve the lot of everyday air travelers, though, remains up in the air. After a decade of incredible industry turbulence — an era when most major U.S. airlines, overwhelmed by soaring fuel prices, recession or both, bit the bankruptcy bullet — the business of commercial air travel is “finally on the brink of stability,” as US Airways’ president Scott Kirby recently put it. That’s not just because fuel prices are leveling or the economy is improving. At least as important is that the airline business is becoming an actual business. Even in an industry long accustomed to poor-mouthing about its horrific finances, officials now dare to envision, however tentatively, some real, sustained profitability. Airlines are “heading in the right direction,” says the trade association’s chief economist; United Airlines’ CEO Jeff Smisek even admits to harboring hopes that the industry is “becoming consistently profitable,” the Chicago Tribune reported. Air travel is up, expected this summer to start closing in on the all-time record levels set before the Great Recession, and U.S. airlines overall made money for the third year in a row in 2012. Losses in this year’s first quarter — typically the industry’s worst — were less than a third of last year’s first-quarter losses. Even the killer jet-fuel costs that once pushed carriers over the bankruptcy cliff are seen now as only a threat to earnings, not to airlines’ corporate survival. (MORE: Why Hotels Aren’t Making a Killing on Fees Like the Airlines) Wall Street is cheering — the index of airline stocks nearly doubled in the past two years and tripled in the past four. Airline workers may cheer too after years of layoffs and pay cuts. So should aircraft … Continue reading Why the No-Frills, Cattle-Herding, Fee-Crazy Airline Business of Today Is Here to Stay